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Noggin releases software module to help businesses respond to mental health and wellbeing events, implement proactive initiatives to support personnel, and better understand opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement.
SYDNEY, Australia | 25 August 2021 – Mental illness is common throughout the world. Neuropsychiatric disorders account for more than a quarter of the burden of disease in the European Union, according to the World Health Organisation. Meanwhile, up to half of chronic sick leaves are due to depression/anxiety.
In Australia, one in five Australians experiencing mental illness every year and an estimated 45 per cent of Australian adults are affected by mental illness at some stage in life. The COVID-19 crisis has also taken its toll on the mental health and wellbeing of the country’s workers; rates of anxiety and depression have risen sharply, by 176 per cent and 61.54 per cent respectively from their pre-COVID-19 baseline. A similar phenomenon has taken place in the U.S., where the Household Pulse survey revealed sharp rises in the number of adults suffering anxiety (from 31.4 per cent to 36.9 per cent) and depressive disorders (from 24.5 per cent to 30.2 per cent)
Responding to these drivers, Noggin, a global industry leader in safety and security technology, has developed the Noggin for Mental Health and Wellbeing module. Housed within the Noggin Safety solution, the Noggin for Mental Health and Wellbeing module contains functionality to help businesses respond to mental health and wellbeing events, implement proactive initiatives to support personnel, and better understand opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement.
Organisations using the Noggin for Mental Health and Wellbeing module can more easily confront the physical and emotional wellbeing challenges of managing distributed workforces, while keeping themselves in compliance with duty of care obligations to mitigate psychosocial hazards to their workers. By enabling better situational awareness of current wellbeing events impacting personnel, the Noggin for Mental Health and Wellbeing module provides the following tools to help organisations promote productive, engaged, and mentally healthy workforces:
- Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice
- Conduct welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice so that organisations can triage their response to events
- Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
- Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
- Customise initiatives based on current events or unique organisational requirements
- Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments
- Enable personnel to request Mental Health and Wellbeing Support
- Direct personnel to support programs and content
- Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from HR software
“The quick succession of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged mental health and wellbeing of workers like never before,” said Noggin CEO and Founder, James Boddam-Whetham. “That’s why we built the Noggin for Mental Health and Wellbeing module. The wellbeing crisis is threatening to take organisations out of compliance with their duty of care obligations, introducing greater risk of higher claims, as distributed workforces make it more difficult for business leaders to remain aware of what is going on. Building the module within our existing safety management solution is an efficient, cost-effective way for organisations to scale up their mental health and wellbeing processes quickly, increase productivity and resilience, as well as more effectively track their mental health and wellbeing spend.”
“The emotional fallout from the long-running pandemic makes a solution like the Noggin for Mental Health and Wellbeing module more important than ever,” noted Noggin Chief Product Officer, Charlie Forsyth. “We are proud of the product we developed, as its functionality not only addresses an organisation’s current wellbeing concerns like reporting, work-from-home ergonomic assessments, and COVID-19 vaccination management but also anticipates what new concerns might be in the future. The positive customer feedback we have received validates our product development logic that businesses want a solution to get them up and running immediately with best-practice templates customisable to their needs but also with sufficient flexibility to build out their own initiatives.”
About Noggin
Noggin is an industry-leader in safety and security technology with its next-generation, cloud-based software platform.
The award-winning Noggin platform provides an all-hazards approach to safety and security management, housing all the tools needed to help make informed decisions and respond effectively to any incident, large or small. Noggin’s software platform includes solutions for: crisis management, business continuity, environmental health and safety, emergency management, security management, and case management.
