Update on BAM’s strategic research project on ‘Mental Health and Wellbeing Policies and Practices: the lived experiences of academics in UK Business Schools’

We hope to invite you to participate in a Pulse Check Survey soon!!

There has been a lot of work going on in the background on the BAM Strategic Project on the Mental Health and Wellbeing of Business School academics, which we launched in 2020 as part of our BAM2024 Strategy – ‘to commission and deliver research that matters to our key stakeholder communities’. The project aims to review wellbeing policies in British universities, and to investigate wellbeing experiences and challenges faced by business schools with a view to developing policy guidance for academics, and those who lead and manage them.

The project structure comprises a core research group, which meets regularly, plus a Steering Group and an Advisory Board, which have met once each so far. An outcome of the Advisory Board meeting was a recommendation that data collection should include a quantitative method. Hence it was decided that a Pulse Check Survey would be carried out.

The design of the Pulse Check Survey was informed by advice and materials available on the websites of Mental Health Charity MIND, What Works Wellbeing, The Office for National Statistics (ONS), HESA, The Health and Safety Executive (HSE), GLAAD and the UCU. We are particularly grateful for the assistance from What Works Wellbeing for the feedback they have given us on the design of survey. The survey has been through several stages of scrutiny and is currently undergoing ethics approval. After that, it will be put onto an online format, piloted, reviewed and then issued through the BAM network.

Your participation in the survey will be critical to providing us with robust data for the project and to inform the design of further data collection methods. The higher the participation in the survey, the more influential and impactful the findings and analysis will be.