This Mental Health Awareness Week we are out and about (well, virtually!) delivering workshops and sharing tools to help our pharmacy family manage their wellbeing.

We’re kicking things off with a time and stress management session for trainees over in East Anglia,  then piloting some new wellbeing content with attendees at the Clinical Pharmacy Congress and finally joining our partners at Alphega Pharmacy for an introduction to wellbeing session for their team.

This session marks the start of a series of wellbeing focused partnership activities with Alphega Pharmacy. Following a series of workshops, we’ll be training up a team of the company’s business mentors as charity ambassadors. This new Ambassador group will support the roll out of a week-long wellbeing campaign we have developed with Alphega Pharmacy for their members, that will run later in the year.

Speaking about the partnership, Raj Nutan, UK Country Head of Alphega Pharmacy, said

“We recognise that this has been an especially challenging 18 months for our pharmacy teams and members, and here at Alphega Pharmacy we wanted to do something to help. Following the success of our partnership last year with the charity’s ACTNow campaign, we decided this year’s partnership activity should have more of an internal focus on supporting the wellbeing of our members. So, this year Alphega Pharmacy has teamed up with the profession’s independent charity, Pharmacist Support, to help our teams champion wellbeing in the workplace.”

Our partner activities do not end there. The charity is also delighted to announce the development of a new student and trainee focused wellbeing workshop we have developed in partnership with the Pharmacists Defence Association. The workshop, titled ‘Get Mentally Prepared’, digs a little deeper into the science behind wellbeing and looks at how tools such as visualisation can help you mentally prepare for the assessment.

And finally, if you’re a regular follower of the charity, you’ll also know that we recently launched a new counselling service in partnership with the Counselling and Family Centre. This free and confidential service is for those seeking direct emotional and psychological support and is appropriate for those who are suffering from anxiety, depression, a change in family circumstances that causes distress, bereavement, and other psychological issues. Further details can be found here.