Stress Awareness Month 2025

Stress Awareness Month is an annual event observed every April dedicated to increasing awareness about the causes and cures of stress. The following courses on the Wakefield District Health and Care Partnership Learning Platform can help you tackle stress and build your resilience:

Managing Your Personal Stress
Millions of working days are lost to work-related stress and its associated health problems every year. When our stress is allowed to continue unchecked, it can lead to depression and anxiety, which can have devastating effects. Controlling work-related stress is a shared responsibility between employers and employees themselves. It can help workers cope if they know how to recognise the signs of stress in themselves and the steps, they can take to control it. In this course, you’ll look at what happens to people suffering from stress at work. This will help you to understand causes, symptoms, and coping strategies.

Mental Health: Stress Less
This short course looks at some of the common triggers for stress and provides some simple yet effective tools for safeguarding our mental health. It will equip you with a better understanding of: why we get stressed and how it affects us how to recognise that we may be becoming stressed reducing stress by ‘working smart’ and taking a strategic approach to our work effective ways of managing our reactions to stressful situations the benefits of having an open dialogue around stress and mental health in general how the six ways to well-being can support our long-term mental health.

Wellbeing and Remote Working
The course highlights several ways that employees can take care of their wellbeing, such as taking notice of how they are feeling and techniques to give emotional relief. It also explains the importance of making proactive changes to their situation to help manage negative emotions, and how quality sleep, physical activity, a well-balanced diet, giving and learning, can positively impact health and wellbeing when working remotely.

Resilience
Resilience is like emotional muscle memory. It enables us to manage challenges that arise in life. This course looks at examples of how resilience in the workplace affects the outcomes in various scenarios. Your challenge is to make decisions that recognise and support resilience in these scenarios.

Developing Emotional Intelligence
Distinct from our intelligence quotient (IQ), our EQ, or emotional quotient, is an indicator of our emotional intelligence, or our awareness of our own emotions and those of others and our understanding of their impact. This short course looks at the five core ‘pillars’ of emotional intelligence and shows how improving our emotional intelligence can help us increase our resilience, build and maintain constructive relationships and deal with difficult situations and people.

Having Difficult Conversations
In our working lives, we will all need to have difficult conversations sometimes. These require a range of communication skills: verbal (e.g. using different types of questions), non-verbal (e.g. body language) and conversation management (e.g. preparing for the conversation and remaining objective). This course focuses on verbal and non-verbal communication skills, the associated planning, and the preparation a manager should do before a challenging conversation with an employee. It follows the scenario of a manager meeting with an employee to discuss a performance issue. Learners must choose the best responses to the employee to progress.

These training courses are free for staff working in any Wakefield District Health and Care Partnership partner organisation. The courses are designed for all experience levels – whether you’re new to a subject, need a refresher, or want to build on your existing knowledge.

In addition, the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub for staff is completely confidential, and offers advice and support that can help with a range of issues.