Mental Health First Aid Refresher Training: How to Prepare

The Mental Health First Aid Refresher training is the perfect way to maintain your MHFA accreditation. Stay up to date on policies and procedures, and keep your skillset sharp. Whether you’re due for an accreditation renewal or you want to brush up on your MHFA skills. There’s one thing that will help to ensure your success upon your course completion: being prepared.

It’s a known fact that being aptly prepared for an important event helps to improve mental clarity. As well as increased organisation. With that said, here are a few tips to help you along your way:

Create a Plan

It’s been said that creating a plan eliminates many of the negatives when taking a course. Including feeling overwhelmed by the material, forgetting important tools you’ll need, and the list goes on. Being unprepared can leave you frazzled and frustrated. These are not good places to be in when you’re trying to learn.

Thankfully, having a plan that works for you will serve you in a variety of ways. It gives you the mental clarity and presence that you’ll need to absorb the information effectively. Whether that means writing yourself a list of materials to have ready. Scheduling your travel so that you arrive on time. Or something else you deem important. Be sure to take care of it ahead of time so that you can be as ready as necessary before class time.

Part of your planning might even be to schedule your Mental Health First Aid Refresher training into the diary well in advance.

Dedicate Enough Time

While this technically falls in with planning, it’s so important that we felt the need to give it a section all its own. Life can get busy, and we all know what that’s like. You’re rushing from one responsibility to the next as per usual. Suddenly it dawns on you that you’ve forgotten that you were supposed to do something.

Don’t let that be the case with something as important as your Mental Health First Aid Refresher training. Setting aside a block of time in your calendar can do wonders to ensure that you’ll be prepared, on time, and ready to learn. Let family members or other important people know you’ll be unavailable during this time as well.

Another tip: set yourself a series of reminders to alert you the week prior, the day prior, etc. This will ensure you’re all set when the time arrives.

Find a Quiet Place

If you’re taking the Mental Health First Aid Refresher training online, it’s imperative that you find a quiet place to attend the Zoom meeting. This means no interruptions. No dogs barking. No kids asking for a snack, no nothing. The importance of this not only affects your learning experience. But also that of the others taking the course with you. So please consider this when scheduling a time to take your online course.

There are options for those of you whose homes are a little on the loud side, as we can all appreciate. We’re only human and have lives after all! Some suggestions might include finding a baby or dog sitter for a few hours. Asking a friend to use their home or office. Sitting in a place like a library or relatively quiet coffee shop. Or even your car will work if that’s all you can do!

Wrapping up

Being prepared is something we all take for granted from time to time, and that’s okay. However, when you’re investing in something as important as education or providing help to others. Or in this case, both. It’s important to help yourself get the most out of the training you’ve signed up for. Not only will you learn more effectively when you’re well prepared. But the people you help will benefit from your skills that much more as well.

Hopefully these tips on how to prepare for your Mental Health First Aid Refresher training will do just that. We appreciate your willingness to help others in their time of need and want you to stay up to date so you can keep on doing what you do best. If you’re approaching your accreditation expiration and need to renew, or even if you just want to update yourself on your skills, we’d love for you to enrol today!

The Mental Health First Aid Refresher Training is endorsed and accredited by Mental Health First Aid Australia.