Mental health support to get people working
Following an eight-month design and development programme, Tellmi has launched an innovative digital mental health support solution that will help the 1.35m people in the UK who are currently economically inactive due to mental ill health to gain and retain employment.
Hiremi is a premium extension to the Tellmi app that provides unemployed young adults, or those at risk of becoming economically inactive, with the tools required to manage their mental health during their job search and to develop the resilience and mental health self-management skills needed to stay in work.
The service, which is currently available in selected commissioned areas, was made possible by grant funding from SBRI Healthcare. In collaboration with Mima, a human-centred design agency, Tellmi conducted a series of co-creation events with Work Coaches in Oxfordshire Jobcentres to understand common experiences among jobseekers with mental health challenges, the existing support already available to them, and how Tellmi could design our service to be accessible and address unmet need.
A combination of our assumptions made from a rigorous research process and guidance received from Work Coaches allowed us to present concepts to an expert advisory group of young adults who had faced challenges gaining or retaining work as a consequence of poor mental health. In weekly online workshops, the group defined the key aspects of the service from what support the service should offer through to what it should be called.
The outcome of this collaborative approach is Hiremi, a dedicated extension to the Tellmi app that provides:
Tellmi’s anonymous, pre-moderated and age-banded peer support platform with additional work and mental health topic tags that allow jobseekers to easily provide each other with reciprocal advice and support
Rapid single-session counsellor intervention for high-risk users
A dedicated, co-created mental health and employment extension which includes tools and resources to help manage stress, boost resilience and overcome barriers to obtaining and maintaining employment
A premium resource and service Directory featuring over 700 national listings for mental health self-management, localised to the commissioned area
Hiremi is now being piloted in Oxfordshire, Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, and South Tyneside and Sunderland. Independent evaluations to measure the impact of the service are being conducted with a view to deploying the service in further regions.
To learn more about Hiremi, see How Hiremi Works, or contact jodie@tellmi.help
