The HeLiPaD Trial: Brief online training to support workplace mental health

The Helipad program has been co-designed by a group of clinicians, people with lived experience, web developers, and employees from relevant divisions of organisations such as human relations (HR). The program consists of five interactive modules addressing the core issues described by the co-design group as being important to facilitating help seeking in workplaces. The modules have been designed to be highly interactive, including clickable diagrams, videos of health professionals and people with lived experience, and interactive quizzes. 1. Recognizing symptoms: Explores signs and symptoms via a ‘traffic light’ model (red, orange, and green indicators) of mental health. This module comprises an interactive map of the body that explains how we can recognize signs, symptoms or ‘indicators’ in our minds and bodies that tell us we might need to pay some attention to our mental health, and suggests what we can do about it. 2. Getting support: Answers questions about how, where, and from which health professionals to seek help for mental health support, and how each provides assistance. Also ‘demystifies’ the process of seeking help by providing specific example pathway [i.e., accessing a psychologist with or without a referral from a general practitioner (GP)] and three individual videos of health professionals (Employee Assistance Program (EAP, Psychologist, GP) explaining what they do to support people’s mental health. 3. Treatment options: Provides information about evidence-based treatment options including psychological, medication, exercise and lifestyle treatments for common mental health problems, including depression and anxiety. These were focused primarily on the psychological strategies approved by the Australian Government Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS: health.gov.au), which are the most accessible psychological treatments available through the MBS, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Relaxation strategies, and Interpersonal Therapy, with further medical and lifestyle treatments suggested by members from the co-design group. This module also contains a practical example of how a specific CBT strategy called “cognitive restructuring”, may work when delivered practice, and an exercise on identifying people in our lives who may support us during challenging times. 4. Helping others: This module explores how to help others in the workplace who may disclose their experiences of mental ill-health, and provides some examples about how different responses to this disclosure can affect the outcome for the person experiencing a mental health issue. It also contains a video of a manager discussing their experience of an employee who disclosed their mental health issue. 5. Supportive workplaces: This final module primarily addresses stigmatizing attitudes towards mental ill-health, help-seeking and disclosure in the workplace. It contains three videos of peers describing positive experiences of disclosing in the workplace, myth-busting information in the form of a quiz on common mental disorders of depression and anxiety, and information targeting fears and concerns around disclosure of mental ill-health in the workplace. Participants will be provided a link to the Helipad intervention program from their workplace. They can access the program from a website that they can access anywhere. Participants will need to access to a device (desktop, laptop, tablet, and/or smart phone) and reliable internet to complete the online program. The program is designed to be completed in a single session, which will take approximately 20 minutes to work through. However, if participants do not complete the program they will be sent a weblink with a reminder to complete it to the email address they provide. Because the program is designed to be competed in a discrete timeframe, this link will expire 1 week after the reminder email is sent. Basic website analytics will be recorded and analysed on aggregate to assess factors such as the time taken to view a webpage, or whether a link was accessed.