read the MHFA England’s social impact  report with pride.

I now lead the City Mental Health Alliance (CMHA), a membership organisation that works with large businesses to help transform their workplaces into mentally healthy environments. CMHA members share MHFAE’s vision for workplaces to support the wellbeing and mental health of employees and they recognise the critical importance of mental health first aid training in achieving that. When a workplace facilitates and encourages open conversations about mental health it enables other mental health and wellbeing initiatives to gain traction and be embedded into the culture.

Mental health first aid has and is playing, a critical role in changing workplace culture, through increasing literacy and skills and normalising conversations about mental health.

Every CMHA member has access to two Mental Health First Aid training places.  I’m proud to say that many of our CMHA members  have gone much further than this to roll out tailored MHFA programmes to boost mental health literacy across their organisations. Last year Bupa was the first company to train its entire Board to become MHFAid-ers. Deloitte, trained over 500 partners and directors with key MHFA skills, with an ambition to ultimately develop the skills of at least one in four leaders. Goldman Sachs is training dozens of UK staff as mental health first aiders. While other members have adopted different mental health training approaches to upskill their managers and leaders. They are all engaging with the training in their own ways, but with a common goal – to increase the confidence and skilling up managers to speak about mental health.

The MHFA community will always hold a very special place in my heart and this continues to grow as I work in my capacity as a MHFAE ambassador.  I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate Simon and his entire team on the incredible numbers that sit behind this report. I look forward to seeing this continue to grow under Simon’s leadership.