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Time to Change Employer Pledge

In 2014, the University, in partnership with the Student's Union, signed the Time to Change Employer Pledge.

About the pledge

Time to Change is a national campaign to tackle the stigma and prejudice associated with poor mental health in the workplace. Tackling this stigma and discrimination is a key part of our commitment to support the health and wellbeing of our community.

time to change logo

Renewing our commitment to tackling stigma and discrimination

The University of Bath signed the Time to Change pledge in 2014. Since that time, there has been a lot of discussion, both locally and across the sector, about the support that is available for staff and students in Universities who are experiencing poor mental health. This has included research published by the Higher Education Policy Unit (HEPI) looking at improving student mental health and the government sponsored Farmer and Stephenson Report into workplace mental health.

As part of our ongoing commitment to develop our community's health and wellbeing, we are in the process of renewing our Time to Change pledge and updating our action plan in partnership with the Students' Union. This updated action plan is based on Mind's Thriving at Work Core and Enhanced Standards developed in response to the findings of the Farmer and Stephenson report.

We have already started work on developing and implementing a health and wellbeing action plan. The University convened a Health and Wellbeing Steering Group in October 2018. This is chaired by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Bernie Morley with representation from senior managers, trade union representatives, staff and students drawn from across the organisation and from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines. The group oversee the development of our plan and monitor progress against our stated objectives.

Headlines from the action plan

  • Improving mental health literacy through mental health and wellbeing training and events for both staff and managers.

  • Developing a network of Wellbeing Champions.

  • Establishing Wellbeing Recovery Action Plans (WRAPs) and Wellbeing Action Plans (WAPs) for individuals, departments and faculties.

  • Investigating and piloting specific support packages for a range of staff groups such as academics, placement officers and personal tutors.

  • Providing an Occupational Health and Employee Assistance service to meet the needs of a wider range of requirements.

  • Creating a wellbeing topic page to enable staff to access a suite of resources to support health and wellbeing

  • Supporting the development of a Mental Health Charter for Universities. This is a UK-wide scheme to recognise and reward those institutions that demonstrate good practice, make student and staff mental health a university wide priority and deliver improved mental health and wellbeing outcomes.

We will publish updates on our progress as we work towards delivering our action plan.

#Asktwice campaign

Watch the video in support of the #Asktwice campaign which is part of the Time to Change Pledge.