By Jena Casas, Ph.D.
Annual wellness visits with a primary care doctor are a standard practice in community healthcare, offering opportunities for screening, education and early intervention. These visits are crucial for promoting preventative healthcare and the early detection of disease. Recognizing that community members often present with both medical and psychological concerns, these visits have evolved to include referrals or brief appointments with mental health providers, resulting in more efficient and comprehensive treatment overall.
Given the wide-ranging benefits of preventative healthcare services, various work settings have adopted similar programs to inform employees about work-related stressors and address work-related health consequences earlier. For example, many police and public safety employers require annual physical exams for staff and are increasingly considering implementing annual mental health wellness visits. While annual physical exams are more common across workplaces, annual mental health wellness visits are a newer initiative that raises important questions about their implementation in law enforcement and public safety agencies.
What is a mental health wellness visit?
A mental health wellness visit is a confidential, periodic, preventative educational meeting with a qualified mental health professional. It is not intended to serve as a mental health assessment or treatment and should not be used to diagnose, document, or evaluate employee mental health-related issues.
Similarly, it is not designed as an organizational tool to monitor, reform, or reprimand employees and should not be used to assess job dysfunction or make performance or fitness-related recommendations. These visits focus on preventative mental health care, promoting employee wellness while maintaining confidentiality.
What are the benefits of a mental health wellness visit?
Research has identified four primary barriers preventing officers from seeking treatment for mental health conditions, despite the potential benefits of these services: [1-3]
- A lack of knowledge about mental health.
- Concerns about the confidentiality of mental health services.
- Stigma surrounding mental health issues.
- The perception that mental health professionals do not understand the unique demands of law enforcement or the nature of the job.
Preventative interventions provide an effective way to address these barriers, enabling officers to learn about mental health and build resilience before encountering dysfunction or impairment. Organizations can adopt mental health wellness visits as an employee-centric service to:
- Enhance employees’ knowledge of mental health through education.
- Alleviate concerns about confidentiality by providing private sessions with providers who uphold confidentiality within legal boundaries.
- Combat stigma surrounding mental health by offering accurate information and confidential support.
- Foster familiarity and trust with mental health professionals by engaging qualified, culturally competent providers.
These preventative mental health measures promote overall wellness and organizational health.
What should a police department do to implement mental health wellness visits?
Mental health wellness visits have the potential to influence and benefit an entire agency. Therefore, it is crucial for leadership to approach their design and implementation with intentionality and purpose. To ensure success, leaders should consider three key factors when developing these preventative mental health programs:
1. Understand agency’s needs
Leadership should aim to evaluate the current state of wellness at their agency, including employee’s needs and receptiveness to services, prior to investing in new programming. To do this, leadership can gather insights directly from employees or consider hiring external consultants such as police and public safety psychologists to assist in information gathering and to support wellness efforts. Helpful questions to ask to gain insight into the culture of the agency include:
- Do employees want mental health services offered through the agency?
- What concerns, if any, do employees have about utilizing mental health services through their agency?
2. Identify and engage resources.
Leadership should vet and hire culturally competent providers who can collaborate on the planning of wellness programming and will contribute to both its design and implementation. At this stage, it will be important to consider how available funding, personnel, time and materials could impact successful implementation. Some helpful questions to ask to shape the design and implementation of the wellness visits include:
- Will the visits be mandatory or optional?
- Will the visits be offered to all staff or to specific staff (i.e., only sworn staff, staff in special assignments, or so forth)
- Will the visits occur on-duty or off-duty?
- Will the visits occur on-site or off-site?
- Will employees be compensated or incentivized for attending visits?
3. Evaluate and improve programming
Leadership should regularly evaluate the effectiveness of wellness visit programming. This can include assessing the impact on employee knowledge, behavior, satisfaction, wellbeing, or usage of services with measurable metrics that highlight successes or areas for improvement.
While methods to collect data and feedback vary widely, leadership should aim to work with their wellness visit program provider/s to ensure efforts are improved and expanded over time. Examples of helpful evaluative questions of the wellness visits may include:
- Are employees satisfied with the mental health wellness visits?
- Are employees comfortable with the mental health wellness visits?
- Do employees know more about mental health services and conditions than they did before they attended a mental health wellness visit?
- Is employee work performance improved due to participation in mental health wellness visits?
The why of mental health wellness visits
Mental health wellness visits represent a proactive and preventative approach to supporting the wellbeing of police and public safety personnel. By addressing key barriers such as stigma and confidentiality concerns, these visits provide an opportunity to foster resilience, enhance mental health literacy, and build trust with mental health professionals.
However, the success of such programs hinges on thoughtful planning, collaboration with culturally competent providers and ongoing evaluation to ensure they meet the unique needs of the agency and its employees. With intentional implementation, mental health wellness visits can become a cornerstone of comprehensive wellness programming, benefiting both individual officers and the overall health of the organization.
References
1. Casas JB, Kegel A. (2023.) Law enforcement mental health: A systematic review of qualitative research. Psychological Services.
2. Inwald R, Panza NR. (2022.) A 2021 Survey of Police & Public Safety Psychologists: Proposed Guidelines for Conducting Periodic Wellness Visits (WVs) vs. Mental Health Evaluations (MHEs) with Working Police/Public Safety Officers. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 37(4), 918-938
3. Jetelina KK, Molsberry RJ, Gonzalez JR, Beauchamp AM, Hall T. (2020). Prevalence of mental illness and mental health care use among police officers. JAMA network open, 3(10), e2019658-e2019658.
About the author
Dr. Jena Casas is a licensed clinical and police and public safety psychologist. She owns and operates a private practice in Nevada and specializes in providing education, consultation and mental health services to first responders, their families and their organizations. She holds a master’s degree in Criminal Justice, a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, is certified as an emergency responder and public safety clinician through the National Emergency Responder and Public Safety Center, and holds licenses to practice psychology in Nevada and within PSYPACT participating states. Dr. Casas has published a number of peer-reviewed publications, her most recent articles pertaining to the mental health of law enforcement personnel, and she regularly presents her research at local, regional and national conferences in the United States.
NEXT: Mental wellness is crucial for effective public safety work. In this video, Gordon Graham, Lexipol co-founder and risk management expert, explains the four dimensions of mental wellness: mental, emotional, social and psychological. These dimensions impact how we think, manage emotions, connect with others and make decisions. Watch the video to learn how to promote mental wellness within your team and enhance overall resilience.