Are you passionate about the health and wellbeing of your team? Mersey Care’s Wellbeing Advocates are a new network of Trust employees, who help raise awareness of staff wellbeing initiatives. The advocates share information, promote events, and signpost colleagues, within their respective teams, to the support and offerings available. This network is run by Occupational Health and Wellbeing and advocates receive regular communications from the Wellbeing Hub with news and updates to share with teammates.

Who can be a Wellbeing Advocate? 

The Wellbeing Advocate role is open to all Mersey Care colleagues of any position or band and is intended to be taken on as a responsibility in addition to your day-to-day role within the organisation. The role is not intended to be a full time, or a paid role.  Therefore, you must have capacity and support from your line manager to be an Advocate.

Role description

The key responsibilities of a Wellbeing Advocate include:

  • Promptly cascading communications from the Wellbeing Hub to their teammates and promoting/displaying information relating to health and wellbeing events and campaigns as directed, within their working areas.
  • Acting as a role model for promoting positive health and wellbeing practice. 
  • Inspiring colleagues to be proactive in looking after their own health and wellbeing, such as encouraging allocated breaks to be taken, drinking plenty of fluids, being active, and engagement with wellbeing activities and support via the Staff Wellbeing Hub.
  • Embedding staff wellbeing into team and departmental meetings in a way that is authentic and meaningful.
  • Be empathetic and non-judgemental. Demonstrate good listening skills, be a good communicator, and overall, be motivated to want to support your colleagues wellbeing.

A Wellbeing Advocate is not:

  • Expected to provide advice to colleagues or deliver wellbeing sessions – Wellbeing Advocates are in place to promote, encourage, listen and signpost colleagues to the services available through the Staff Wellbeing Hub where necessary.

The benefits of being a Wellbeing Advocate include, but are not limited to:

  • Opportunity to support the health and wellbeing of your team.
  • Networking with likeminded people from across the Trust
  • A sense of wellbeing, knowing that you are doing something beneficial for your colleagues.
  • Advocates can attend drop-in network meetings for further updtaes and troubleshooting. These meetings are led by the wellbeing team.
  • Advocates can access support from a Health and Wellbeing Facilitator to aide in their role as desired, and they can contact the team with any queries as needed.

The Trust’s in-house health and wellbeing team oversee the running of the advocate role, and provide support as needed. This includes the offer of drop-in support sessions and additional training.

The following selection of training packages and resources, are available to Wellbeing Advocates immediately, to enable successful awareness raising and to encourage colleagues to implement positive health and wellbeing practices:

It is important that if you are interested in becoming a Wellbeing Advocate for your team, you have a conversation with your line manager beforehand. Once you have done this, you can contact Occupational Health and Wellbeing to confirm by clicking here.