Mental health is a significant issue within every workplace, heightened after the challenges the past 18 months have brought.

Ventia's Healthy Minds program is helping us deliver on our commitment to raise awareness, reduce stigma and support those with mental health conditions across our business. 

Our program was today announced as a finalist in the 2021 National Safety Awards of Excellence 'Best Mental Health Program' award. 

This award requires companies to describe an innovative health and wellbeing program that has resulted in improvements within an organisation, and to demonstrate that it has had a positive effect on the participants and/or the workplace through changes in workplace behaviour, performance or processes.

At Ventia we put health and safety above all else. As a large employer across Australia and New Zealand, we take our responsibility of supporting our people to stay healthy, well, and resilient seriously. The results delivered from our in-house designed and developed Healthy Minds program have so far exceeded expectations. 

The power of connection

By tapping into the power of personal connection, we created a mental health peer support network - the Healthy Minds Champions. We currently have over 120 Healthy Minds Champions across our business. Employees like Mike Lowe and Kat Griffiths in New Zealand and Soroosh Mirzaee and Ben Cole in Australia have undertaken professional training and receive ongoing support from external psychologists so they can understand the signs and symptoms of mental health issues in the workplace and know how to best refer employees to additional services and support. 

Group Executive Safety, Health, Environment & Quality Christian Frost says that our Healthy Minds Champions help connect and support our geographically dispersed workforce and amplify the key messages and elements of the Healthy Minds program. Christian says:

Supporting our workers through mental health conditions is not only the right thing to do.  It helps individuals build resilience, self-esteem and coping skills, it creates a more productive workforce and it enables us to retain our skilled and experienced employees.

Winners of the 2021 National Safety Awards of Excellence will be announced on 8 December.