For 2 years, Combat Stress has been a strategic lead for the Veteran’s Places, Pathways, and People Programme (VPPP), funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, which aimed to give veterans safe, welcoming places to go in their local community, and provide best possible access to mental health systems and treatment pathways.
With over a century’s experience of providing specialist support to veterans with mental health issues, Combat Stress developed training for those working within the VPPP programme, to share this knowledge and expertise, via the launch of their collaborative online learning and development platform.
This platform has since enabled the charity to provide interactive on-demand training to leaders, frontline workers and volunteers to ensure that, from top to bottom, there is in-depth knowledge of how to support veterans with complex mental health issues and create better, sustainable support in the communities where they live.
The 25 hours of training, covered the following topics:
- Trauma and PTSD
- Suicide prevention
- Transitions of care or Support
- Trauma Informed Organisations
- Domestic Abuse
- Women veterans and Gender sensitive Services
- Safeguarding
- Military Focused mental Wellbeing
- Military Mythbusters
- Signposting Veterans
The VPPP programme has now finished, but Combat Stress is delighted by the engagement and successes the training has achieved, with over 455 learners using the training platform from 76 organisations across the UK, and over 766 hours of online training, and 24 live events, delivered.
There are plans to roll out further extensive specialist training to organisations, via the charity’s Learning and Development platform, in the coming months.
Success in Stats
- 88% said they had found the online courses very or extremely valuable.
- Users gave an average rating of 8.44 (out of 10) to the question “How much do you think the online courses have helped you to develop your knowledge and understanding about veterans’ mental health?”.
- 77% said they found the live sessions very or extremely valuable.
- 92% felt it was important for them to be able to access the learning community to share best practice, experiences and learn together.
- 93% found the networking opportunities provided by the platform very or extremely valuable.
- 88% said they would recommend Combat Stress Learning to others.
Feedback from beneficiaries
“The platform is delivering the right type of learning” “The beauty of it is that you can do it in your own home, in your own time”. – Paul Dunkley, Veterans Community network
“Very valuable training platform and enabled our service to make contact with Pride in Veterans as an individual service in North Wales, whilst Alabaré were already on board. This gave us a more personal service with the South Wales Pride service.” Jenny Jone, Alabare
“I have to confess that I’m a Dinosaur when it comes to tech, But once I had logged on and started the very valuable learning platform courses i very much liked it and have recommended it often to the network. I personally found it very useful and helpful very informative.” – Stephen Sullivan, Adferiad.
“Extremely helpful and informative. The programme has supported me to refresh my skill-set and update knowledge that has been gained over a number of years in diverse environments.” – Gwyn Andrews
“I will be encouraging all members of our team to avail of any future learning opportunities provided” – Susan Lavery, DMWS
“I find it user friendly. There is no pressure to keep returning, it very much lets you use it as and when you can/need. Being able to see your personal achievements is good and others so that you can link up, should you need to. Good range of training available to a high/informative standard.” – Anon.
