Member Article

Nugent Santé and Mente take charge to create a solution to combat mental illness

Mental health is a very hot topic right now and there is a global problem that nobody is really leading or championing.

Nugent Santé believe that delivering a unique digital mental health platform, powered by Mente, takes ownership of the problem and provides much needed support to employers and their employees to help prevent mental health conditions becoming unmanageable.

Paul Nugent, Managing Director of Nugent Santé commented, “All employers have both a moral and legal duty of care to their staff and Mente will help them remain compliant whilst ensuring their employees remain healthy. The key thing about Mente is not just the education tools, diagnostics and audit trail that offer a layer of protection on mental health and safety, but also the integrated absence management tool that will be rolled out in October 2018.

The absence management tool will allow businesses to manage sickness and calculate costs within the platform to see how much physical and mental health is costing the business, as well as calculating the ROI on the wellbeing solutions used to tackle the problem. No one else in the market is delivering this type of risk based solution specifically aimed at mental health and we believe this powerful tool will provide comprehensive data to allow businesses to fully understand the impact and associated costs of illness on their bottom line.“

Through the Mente online mental health tool, employees will be provided with resources to help them understand mental health, as well as pathways to gaining support for a whole array of issues including debt management, bereavement and addictions. All the courses have been developed by a team of professionals from the mental health and compliance sectors and the courses have gained CPD accreditation offering continued personal development on important topical subjects. One of Mente’s goals is to remove taboos around mental health, so it may be understood, accepted and managed in the same way as physical health, allowing employees to feel confident in discussing the subject openly.

Paul continued, “Mente is unlike the Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) which so many businesses buy into and that are hugely under-utilised by employees and most often are too little too late, as the employee is already facing a major problem. Mente is about early intervention and empowering employees to take responsibility for their own health, and delivering education, diagnostics and signposting to immediate support. Alongside this, the employer has an audit trail clearly tracking the support they have provided to add a layer of evidence in cases of litigation and the huge increased level of workplace tribunals caused by mismanagement of employee welfare.”

Nugent Santé were early adopters of the platform and have been involved with Mente since they took part in the pilot of their beta product in 2017. Since inception Mente have raised over £100,000 from private investors as well as receiving three rounds of funding from the European Regional Directive Fund (ERDF) through working closely with Lancaster University over the past 12 months.

Mel Joseph, Founder of Mente added, “Businesses need to evolve with the changing workplace environment and ensure they not only meet their moral duty of care to employees but also remain compliant under current legislation. The Mente platform provides the tools and resources to manage a healthy workforce and protect the bottom line of the business with a suite of educational solutions and professional guidance on a buy as you need basis.”

Mente is working closely with a number of businesses who will follow Nugent Santé in the national roll out of the platform to their clients in the coming weeks.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Zebra Colour .