Many professionals work to support people with mental health issue during their life, but many of them do not have a specific education or training in supporting these people in the job placement. EQUIL tries to address this gap through a training programme that will be developed during the two years project.
Following an analysis of the different national/local situations in the partner countries, four training modules have been developed:
- Employment Support Models
- Educator/Practitioner Skills for Supporting People with Mental issues who want to work
- Educator/Practitioner Skills for Supporting Employers to Employ and Retain People with Lived Experiences
- European Guided Toolkit for Co-production
After the Co-production of the training modules, partners met for the Short-term joint staff training event in Palermo from the 26th to the 30th of September 2016 to review findings, discuss the key learning outcomes of these training modules and experiment the exercises developed. Partners will finalise the Modules above mentioned on the bases of the feedbacks gathered by partners during the Short term joint staff training.
In the next months, the piloting phase of the training modules will take place and will involve:
- 25 practitioners, that will increase their knowledge and awareness on values and beliefs needed to be able to support people with mental health issues back into the workforce (Module 1 – Employment Support Models);
- 250 people affected by mental health issues who will be supported by practitioners on how to enter and/or return into the labour market (Module 2 – Educator/Practitioner Skills for Supporting People with Mental issues who want to work);
- 18 employers who will be supported and encouraged by practitioners to recruit people who may have experienced mental health illness (Module 3 – Educator/Practitioner Skills for Supporting Employers to Employ and Retain People with Lived Experiences);
- 20 practitioners will experiment Co-production by involving other relevant actors in the development of a service or a product (Module 4 – European Guided Toolkit for Co-production).
The next steps of the project have been discussed with a focus on how to implement the piloting phase in each country and the different obstacles practitioners might have in implementing the training modules with people with lived experiences.
The main obstacles arisen have been:
- stigma and prejudice in communities and employers’ lack of knowledge on relation between mental illness and job performance;
- heterogeneity of services supporting people affected by mental illness.
EQUIL is a project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme – Key Action 2 Strategic partnerships for Adult Education promoting the inclusion of people with mental health issues in the labour market.
For more information on the piloting of the training programme and project activities, you can contact stefania.giambelluca@cesie.org
