Over the past year, colleagues from across Durham have been working hard to improve the wellbeing of staff and students.

We’ve been organising events, helping people to get support, and implementing plans to enhance physical and mental health – both at work and at home.

Dialogue looks at what you said, and highlights some of things we did as a result…

Resources

Through the staff survey in 2021, colleagues told us that they wanted more support to improve wellbeing at Durham.

We therefore launched our first Health and Wellbeing Strategy to guide our wellbeing activities. Over the past year, we’ve been developing our Health and Wellbeing Hub on SharePoint to give staff and students a single place to access details about events and support available.   

We’ve also created guides and resources to help colleagues with a range of issues, including Mental Health Signposting Guide and Colleague Conversation Compass to support conversations around wellbeing.

Events

In October last year, we published the University’s first Wellbeing Calendar to highlight wellbeing campaigns and activities from across our community.  

We’re also continuing to hold monthly Wellbeing Cafés that bring colleagues together to find out about a variety of topics, which have included men’s health, menopause and stress awareness.   

The Making a Difference at Durham event in September gave people the chance to find out more about what’s happening across the University, including wellbeing issues. We also have a programme of development workshops which include sessions to support managers with wellbeing conversations, and colleagues to develop themselves at work. 

Practical help

Over the past year, our 50 Staff Mental Health First Aiders have been helping colleagues and directing them to the help we offer to improve colleague mental health.

This includes the Employee Assistance Programme of 24/7 expert and confidential support around health and general wellbeing. 

We also produced Team Wellness Action Plans to help dialogue between teams and managers to identify factors that can affect health and wellbeing.  

More details

We’ll have more details about the work we’ve been doing to improve wellbeing at the University in Dialogue Signposts on 13 January.

You can also have your say on a range of wellbeing issues in the latest Pulse Survey for staff - keep an eye out for the survey from 17 January.