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- In short: A hospitality business has improved staff retention by becoming a mentally healthy workplace
- What's next? Restaurant owner Bianca Welsh is sharing the mental health model she has developed with other businesses
Bianca Welsh's restaurant has become known not only for its food but also as a mentally healthy workplace.
"To see the camaraderie in the team the level of understanding and empathy that we have it just warms my heart," Ms Welsh said.
But in the past 18 months, Ms Welsh has had to apply everything she has learnt about mental health for her business to her own life after she and her partner Jimmy experienced the death of a child.
"We lost a baby at full term [after a] termination for medical reasons, which is a whole other taboo subject — baby loss, then add on termination for medical reasons.
"[It's] just something that has so much stigma around it," she said.
Ms Welsh said losing her son Herb was a "choice-less choice".
"We were extremely unlucky to have been diagnosed with something so rare in the last few weeks of gestation, even our specialists we saw in Hobart hadn't seen anything this severe before.
"We faced three weeks of scans, tests, procedures, assessments, and decisions no parent ever wants to make."
Her emotional Instagram post captured her heartbreak:
"To our darling Herb: To have watched you suffer would have been a million times worse.
"To see you in pain and discomfort for potentially the entirety of your predicted short life of just years is something I can't fathom seeing you go through."
The pain for Bianca and her family has been ongoing.
"I was subsequently diagnosed with PTSD, which is my first mental illness diagnosis," she said.
"Losing a child ranks up there as one of the worst things that can happen to someone … I was so unprepared for experiencing that loss, and ill-equipped and not prepared for how difficult it would be."
She said she received "amazing care" through a psychologist who was "the right fit".
Ms Welsh said she had found it therapeutic to write letters to her son, as well as reading the stories of others who have had similar experiences.
"[It helped me] feel less alone, because I certainly felt very alone in those really dark times."
She said becoming pregnant again and giving birth to her daughter, Rani, in recent weeks had been "overwhelming and traumatic but at the same time joyous and healing".
Creating a mentally healthy workplace
Mental health had been at the forefront of Ms Welsh's mind long before she experienced her own traumatic loss.
In her first year of owning and running her Launceston restaurant more than a decade ago, she noticed mental health issues among the staff.
"On the ground to us that looked like difficulty showing up to work, calling in sick, their ability to perform when they are here, their inability to interact with their peers and obviously the customer," she said.
Ms Welsh did a university degree in behavioural science and developed a mental health program for her business,.
The program aims to reduce stigma around mental health and involves having continued conversations about mental health with employees.
Ms Welsh said she had supported and retained staff who had experienced a range of mental health issues, from depression and anxiety to bipolar disorder.
"There's definitely situations where it's very acute and they need to take some time off, but mostly we want to try and work with them to stay within the workplace [in] some capacity if they feel safe and comfortable to do so," she said.
Daily mental health check ins
As well as directing staff to professional services, like GPs, psychologists, and counselling services, Ms Welsh encourages them to adopt good daily mental health practices.
"A psychology appointment is one hour in a month, so there are so many other hours in a month that people can be perhaps proactively doing things, and that can be hard when you're unwell," she said.
"All those self-care things that we talk about: having good connections, having maybe some help lines on the ready if things get quite serious, having good sleep and food practices as well exercise," Ms Welsh said.
Making mental health a priority has also had benefits for the restaurant's bottom line.
"[The] industry average for hospitality is about 80 per cent [staff] turnover which is one of the worst across industries in Australia," Ms Welsh said.
"We were definitely sitting at that in our early years and now we very proudly sit below 20 per cent."
Sharing the knowledge
Ms Welsh is training other hospitality businesses in how to become mentally healthy workplaces.
She believes that given the industry is mostly made up of 16- to 25-year-olds it is in a unique position to work in early intervention and prevention of mental illness.
"That is the most common age of onset of a mental illness or experiencing poor mental health," she said.
"Hopefully we can be contributing to that space and not just letting people get too unwell that they're then in the reactionary end of the mental health system, which we know there's a lot broken with the system at the moment."
The Australian Association of Psychologists said the percentage of young working Australians reporting a high level of psychological distress had doubled to more than 30 per cent since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is calling on the federal government to increase the number of Medicare subsidised psychology appointments.
Community level support needed
A recent survey by the Mental Health Council of Tasmania found 60 per cent of respondents delayed accessing support in the past 12 months because of the cost.
"Even if someone can afford to see their GP, and can get an appointment, this often puts them on a pathway to other supports that are just as difficult to access and afford," the council's chief executive Connie Digolis said.
Ms Digolis said greater investment was needed in community-based, lower-level supports, which cost less and help people earlier.
"The system has tended to stay with the one pathway which is a medical model and we haven't actually provided some space to educate people on the range of options that they can actually be accessing quite easily," she said.
"We take a very risk-focused approach towards people's mental health and we teach people to look for what could be wrong, we don't actually help people understand what could be right and how to really utilise and build on what's right."
While she wishes she had never experienced the loss of a child, Ms Welsh said the experience had given her a new understanding of mental health issues, and she hopes to use that insight to help others.
"Trying to … take my own advice [about mental health] has been really, really difficult, but I feel like I am getting to the other side of being able to communicate what has worked for me, in the hope that I can help others heal."
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