Debrief leaders and plan ahead

Organise a senior debrief meeting to highlight how investment in mentally healthy working practices may have improved productivity, creativity and overall production value.

Discuss the resources and actions that proved most effective and what was harder to implement.

Being together in person is often helpful, but if that’s difficult to arrange, set up a virtual debrief so it’s easier for everyone to attend, including those who may have moved on to new projects.

If you can’t meet face-to-face, a virtual debrief is the preferable alternative, but surveys or an email debrief are possible too if people are squeezed for time.

During your senior debrief, share and discuss any feedback from your wash-up meetings and exit interviews with crew.

Ensuring you share details of any successes – such as how a flexible working arrangement allowed a senior freelancer to return to work – so leaders can see the positive impact of their mental health and wellbeing decisions.

Be brave and prepare to have honest conversations with your heads of department about their teams and how the project went.

If you worked with a mental health first aider or a psychologist, ask them for general feedback that doesn’t breach confidentiality ahead of the meeting.

Review the effectiveness of your mental health risk assessment (MHRA) during your senior debrief.

Report on your identified risks and implemented actions, along with any changes that were required or hazards that you would include for future productions.

Discuss whether provisions made in the budget enabled you to meet the needs of your crew, ensuring commissioners are involved in your conversations.

We’re aware many budgets don’t contain provisions for mental health support, but, if possible, we suggest examining how you can review your future planning to ring-fence a line for relevant resources.

Providing additional mental health and wellbeing support can be relatively low cost but can have huge impact.

Funders, whether commissioners or broadcasters, are central to championing mental health and wellbeing support on productions and bringing about real change across our industry.

Ensure you share any findings from your debrief, and ask commissioners to recommend our Toolkit to other productions they engage to extend support to future productions.

We want to hear what worked well and what didn’t on your production so that we can keep offering strong and practical support to productions of all sizes, budgets and scopes.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve our Toolkit guides, please fill in our survey or email our team.