Open to all Mountain Rescue team members in Scotland, the Wellbeing Weekends are opportunities to learn and share ideas. Primarily they are opportunities to gather members of teams from across Scotland together to network and consider best practice.

On the Saturday we will running the Lifelines combined course: Staying Well – Understanding Resilience and Self-Care and Supporting Your Colleagues/Team.

This intensive full day session is an opportunity to learn more about what keeps us well and how to strengthen supportive relationships. This course is suitable for all, no matter what stage you are at in your volunteering journey.
During the Staying Well: Understanding Resilience and Self-care part of the day, we discuss the things that protect our wellbeing in our roles (our protective armour) and what might threaten that, and how to stock our Psychological 1st Aid kits. We learn about the impact of trauma and stress so we can recognise when we might need some help and where we can find this. We will explore what we might mean by our stress.
The Supporting Your Colleagues/Team part of the day looks at what we can do to strengthen supportive relationships and build strong teams. We know that relationships based on camaraderie, trust and respect act as a buffer against the challenges of volunteering in mountain rescue. Some of you will also be in leadership/managerial roles. Strong teams, good leadership and peer support keep people well. You will learn how to have helpful conversations with colleagues, how to recognise signs that someone may be struggling and what to do when you are worried about someone.

On the Sunday we will turn our attention to potentially traumatic incidents and what can influence how we might react to these.

Most of the time we will be fine (our protective armour in place) but there are factors that might play a part in breaching that protection – perhaps jobs where we feel our lives were at risk, where we or our colleagues were injured, where we feel we fell short of providing the best outcome, or where we feel overwhelmed by the task or because we were already overwhelmed by “stuff”. Can we learn to assess some of the warning flag indicators ourselves (self-assessment) and how can we perhaps identify when an incident has the potential to be difficult for team members? We will discuss a potential post incident tool that could help individuals and incident managers.
There is also the question of how to help the friends/families/by-standers during the rescue phase while still concentrating on the main rescue. These individuals could potentially have been impacted by the unfolding event. Do we have certain individuals in our teams who are allocated to deal with these people – do we consider the skills required for this? We will be joined by Edward Kinnear, an experienced member of Kendal MRT and outdoor professional, who has a particular interest in the idea of “temporary impairment” when managing the safe evacuation of friends/families/by-standers from an incident site.
This will be an opportunity to share what is done within your own team currently and to discuss possible toolkits that might help. We will also refresh everyone on the support that we have in place for team members and their families.

SMR Wellbeing Weekend