June 30, EU-PROMENS and NWA conducted the final evaluation workshop for the Danish activities covering a total of 3 Core Trainings and 4 Advanced Training sessions with more than 140 participants in total.

The full recording can be found as a Microsoft Sharepoint Event recording here – or find an executive summary below.

When Her Excellency the Honourable Carolyn Bennett looks at a problem, she does not see a solitary symptom, an isolated voter, or a single border. She sees a root system.

Currently serving as the Canadian Ambassador to Denmark, Bennett’s career is a masterclass in breaking down silos. Before entering diplomacy, she spent over two decades as a family physician, delivered thousands of babies, and served as a Member of Parliament for 26 years—including tenures as Canada’s first Minister of State for Public Health and Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. Whether navigating the chaotic aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak, indigenous rights or managing modern international relations, Bennett’s philosophy has remained remarkably consistent: real solutions are found bottom-up, built by the people who live and work in the trenches.

The Flower Shop Philosophy: A Lesson in Intersectionality

Long before the concept of intersectionality became a buzzword in academic circles, Bennett was learning its core mechanics in her family’s flower shop.

“I grew up in a flower shop,” she recalls, explaining how the business relied on a tightly coordinated ecosystem of diverse talents. The designers who styled the arrangements were not always the best at dealing with customers, while the delivery drivers held localized, practical knowledge that couldn’t be taught from behind a desk. “A designer would occasionally go out to the delivery room and try and tell somebody in what order to deliver the parcels,” Bennett says, “and you go, ‘No, they actually know where there’ll be traffic. It’s better to go this way than that way'”.

This upbringing taught her a foundational rule that she carried straight into medicine, politics, and diplomacy: “Know what you know, know what you don’t know, and know who and when to go for help“. As a family doctor, she actively rejected the “super-specialization” that ignored the bigger picture. Instead, she championed the role of the generalist—the person who respects all players and understands how different sectors interact, whether it is medical disciplines collaborating or looking at how nature, housing, and poverty dictate human wellness.

Respect and Trust are the pillars of successful collaboration

To build a truly interdisciplinary system, Bennett argues that you must strip away institutional arrogance and replace it with two core ingredients: respect and trust.

In medicine, this meant moving away from rigid “scopes of practice” that barred capable professionals from contributing, shifting instead toward “core competencies” and mutual trust. Bennett highlights this through the concept of “delegated acts” within her own past medical practice, relying on a deeply experienced registered nursing assistant.

“It is about the ability to observe her a number of times until she feels confident… ‘See one, do one, teach one,'” Bennett notes. This model required absolute trust and accountability: “Knowing that in a delegated act, if she makes a mistake, it’s my mistake… This was a mutual decision, and it’s still my responsibility”. For Bennett, true collaboration requires creating a safe space where professionals—and patients—are treated as true partners, stripping away self-interest to form a cohesive team.

Telemedicine and the Burning Platform of COVID-19

Too often, bureaucratic inertia blocks progress until a crisis forces a paradigm shift. Bennett calls this a “burning platform”. For the healthcare sector, that platform was the COVID-19 pandemic.

For over fifteen years, advocates had pushed for virtual care options, particularly for young people or individuals who frequently missed appointments due to logistical barriers. Yet, administrative and financial systems resisted. When COVID-19 arrived, the impossible suddenly became a daily reality. E-prescribing and virtual appointments flourished because they had to.

This sudden evolution cracked open new pathways for equity, proving that a flexible approach works. When it comes to adopting team-based care or new technological integrations, Bennett’s advice to hesitant establishments is simple and pragmatic: “Try it, you’ll like it”.

Bridging Distances: From Canada to Greenland and Denmark

Now, as Canada’s Ambassador to Denmark, Bennett sees how these lessons bridge the massive geographic and cultural distances separating the North American Arctic and Scandinavia.

Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark (through its deep relationships with Greenland and the Faroe Islands) share the immense challenge of providing equitable care across vast, isolated expanses. Telemedicine and e-health have transitioned from modern conveniences to absolute lifelines for northern, remote indigenous communities.

Furthermore, Bennett emphasizes that Western frameworks are profoundly incomplete without Indigenous knowledge. Whether collaborating through the Arctic Council or conducting research in Cambridge Bay, true progress requires integrating local expertise. Just as Canadian healthcare is striving to embrace First Nations’ holistic “medicine wheel”—addressing the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual quadrants of wellness—modern diplomacy must acknowledge that communities understand their own environments best.

Trusting the Experts of Lived Experience

Ultimately, Carolyn Bennett’s journey from a family doctor clinic to an embassy is united by a singular, democratic truth: the people affected by a system are the ones who know it best.

In medicine, the patient is the ultimate expert on their own body and life, while the doctor is merely an expert on the available tools and tests. The exact same logic applies to a healthy democracy. Citizens are the experts on what is working and failing in their neighborhoods; the politician’s job is simply to understand the levers of the system well enough to implement the changes those citizens actually need.

By flattening hierarchies and treating both patients and citizens as essential partners, Ambassador Bennett continues to prove that whether you are delivering a baby, drafting public health legislation, or reinforcing Arctic alliances, you must always look the people in the eye, listen to their stories, and trust their expertise.

Staying human under pressure – a meaningful challenge and growth for a Greek volunteer firefighter

There is a moment Eleanna Malliou returns to when asked about mental resilience. She is in a fire truck moving through a crowd of families who have been told to leave their homes. A wildfire is burning somewhere above them in the mountain. The people standing on either side of the road don’t know yet whether their houses will be there when it ends.

“When we passed through, I saw the kids, the families – you could see very anxious people, people who looked more relaxed but you knew inside they were not,” she says. “There are people who don’t know if in two hours their home will still be there. And I’m going to help them – but that sank my heart.”

What she describes is not quite fear and not quite sadness. It is something more precise: the emotional weight of being the person driving toward the thing everyone else is running from, while being close enough to feel exactly what that costs them. “I felt nice that I was helping,” she says. “But I felt bad because of the feelings they would be experiencing at that point.”

This double sensation – the pull of purpose against the weight of what you witness – is perhaps the most honest description of what mental resilience actually feels like from the inside. Not toughness. Not detachment. A bridge, as she puts it, between helping and feeling bad.

Eleanna Malliou (front row, second from right) is a volunteer firefighter and member of OEDD: the Volunteer Forest Firefighters and Rescuers of Ekali, a community-based team founded in 2000 in the Ekali suburb north of Athens, currently participating in the MentaStress project.

Personality, preparation, and knowing your gaps

Eleanna is candid that resilience is not the same for everyone. It starts with personality. “Someone who is really sensitive would get more impacted by going to incidents with bad things happening,” she says. She counts herself among the sensitive ones – and then describes, without any contradiction, how she has managed to function effectively anyway.

Her answer is preparation. “What always helps me feel that I’ll react more okay is getting as much knowledge as I can – so when I get there, I know how to help.” The logic is straightforward: anxiety is sharpest when you don’t know what to do. Training doesn’t eliminate the emotional charge of an incident; it keeps the not-knowing from overwhelming you on top of it. “Of course, I’m touched by the fact that someone got hurt – but I also get a nice feeling, because I go help them. I take some of the bad thoughts out and I’m like: I was there, I helped, I did everything I could.”

She is also honest about limits. “I have no idea how I’m going to react if I eventually go to a person who has passed. No one knows how they will react until they face it.” What she has instead of certainty is a team. She describes knowing that colleagues with more experience can cover her gaps – and knowing that if she needs to, she can step back to the truck, sit down, and give herself time to come back to herself. 

A culture still learning to talk mental health

As an organisation, OEDD was born some 25 years ago. Debriefing – the vital, structured conversation after an incident – actually came later. So for the early years of the team’s existence, it simply wasn’t there. Is it not a given in any culture.

And when Eleanna is asked what single practice she would recommend to any volunteer fire team that didn’t yet have it, she doesn’t hesitate: “Debriefing. I know I’ve been repeating myself, but I feel it’s a really important step.” The reason she gives is precise: “You may think you did something wrong when you eventually didn’t. Or you heard the story from only your perspective. If you don’t hear it from everyone, your thoughts just go around.”

She recalls a group of colleagues who came back from a wildfire that turned on them – the kind where the fire reverses direction without warning. “They had a huge debrief. It was three hours long, which is a long one.” They all came out better. She saw it with her own eyes.

“It’s still kind of a taboo thing. Some people, it’s their ego going in front. But we always know that if we need to talk to someone, there’s someone there – without judging us.”

Mental health in firefighting, she acknowledges, remains largely a taboo. Direct conversations 

about psychological strain are still rare. What her team does have is something quieter: the knowledge that if you need to talk to someone, someone will be there, without judgement. She hopes the MentaStress project shifts this further – while being realistic that not everyone will put their ego down. Some, she thinks, will engage with the material quietly and alone, at home, when no one is watching.

Breathing through it: the 5-3-2-1 method

Among the tools the MentaStress project has introduced to her team, two stand out for Eleanna: a breathing exercise and the 5-3-2-1 grounding method. Both matter, she says, because they are doable – practical enough to use in real conditions, including sitting in a fire truck on the way back from a wildfire. “Having a few exercises in your head – breathe in, breathe out, relax – maybe after a very intense thing, you can sit in the truck while moving back and calm yourself down.” 

The 5-3-2-1 method – a grounding tool that uses the five senses to anchor attention back to the present moment – proved its value beyond the fire station when Eleanna’s flatmate, who struggled with anxiety, turned out to already be using it. “She said the 5-3-2-1 method, I use it a lot to calm myself down. That’s when I realised – these are not only things to keep in the fire station. You may find yourself in a very stressful situation anywhere. It’s good to know how to bring yourself back to normal.”

A message to young Europeans

Eleanna is one of the younger firefighters in her team, and one of relatively few women. When asked what she would say to other young Europeans considering volunteer firefighting, she doesn’t reach for recruitment language. She reaches for something more honest.

“It for sure gives you personal growth. You grow up faster. You see the world more.” There is knowledge you gain that you would never have thought you needed, and that turns out to be useful in ways you couldn’t have predicted. Being part of an emergency response team changes how you move through ordinary life: she no longer drinks and drives. Not as a rule someone imposed on her, but because she has seen what happens when people do, and there is simply no “fine” in it anymore.

Her call to action is not dramatic; “If you find it at least a tiny bit interesting, go try it. You don’t lose anything. When the wrong moment comes, you will be more ready to face it than people who have no idea about fire safety.”

She pauses, then adds the other part: helping people feels good. When she goes to an incident and does everything she can, even when the outcome isn’t what she hoped, she carries something back: I was there. I helped. That, in the end, is also what resilience is built from.

As part of our work in the EU Social Innovation+ Initiative project ISRICM, the Nordic Wellbeing Academy and its European partners are happy to release recording of the third webinar in our series from March 4 on leadership.

The webinar features the key experts Julia Persson – Scita Health and Nordic Charter for Women’s Health 2040 , Roit Feldenkreis – Conductor Director of Leadership Excellence Program Lotem, and Lars Münter – Nordic Wellbeing Academy.

For more than thirty years, Steve Worrall’s professional identity was forged in the intensity of the fire service. His career progressed from trainee engineer at Rolls-Royce to Assistant Chief Fire Officer for Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service. Leadership in that environment was shaped by rigid hierarchy and a directive “Incident Commander” mindset, where the objective was always clear: rescue the casualty and bring them to safety.

When Steve later transitioned into a third career in psychotherapy, he discovered that the greatest challenge was not learning new techniques, but undergoing a profound psychological, moral and relational reorganisation. The shift required him to fundamentally rethink what it meant to lead, to help and to serve.

The Wall of “Big Boys Don’t Cry”

Steve describes the emergency services as operating within an unspoken but powerful cultural rule: “There’s still an underlying current and underlying culture within the emergency services… of big boys don’t cry and it’s a sign of weakness to put your hand up and say I’m suffering.” Whilst a structured ‘critical incident debrief’ process existed for fire crews as a form of collective group therapy post traumatic incidents, very few firefighters reached out for individual support. Emotional struggle, vulnerability or trauma were rarely acknowledged and were often viewed as weaknesses that could threaten operational credibility. Throughout his thirty-year career, Steve never cried once, even after attending hundreds of deeply distressing and horrific incidents.

The emotional wall finally cracked shortly before his retirement in 2013, while undertaking charity work in Romania. During a visit to a former prison that had become an old people’s home, he sat holding the hand of a dying woman living in appalling conditions. She asked him if he had rope on his fire engine, explaining that she wanted to hang herself. Steve says: “A tear rolled down her cheek and dropped on my hand and it was like molten metal… I came away and returned back to the United Kingdom and I cried non-stop for two weeks.”

On returning to the UK, when his senior officer witnessed him breaking down, the response was silence: the officer simply turned around and walked out. As Steve reflects, in their professional world, officers simply did not know how to respond to emotional exposure. Looking back on that period in his life, Steve is only now able to acknowledge that he unknowingly was suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress syndrome.’

From Rescuer to Empowerer

At the age of 60, Steve made the decision to “go back to school” and train as a psychotherapist. The most difficult adjustment was letting go of the rescuer role. In the fire service, Steve had been trained to take control, act decisively, and solve problems under pressure in a dynamic fast-moving environment. In therapy, his tutors repeatedly challenged him to step back, slow the pace and trust the client’s capacity for self-rescue. Empowerment, rather than intervention, became the goal.

“I wanted to be a rescuer… I wanted to dive in and rescue people and take them to a place of safety because I am an incident commander… but you have to empower people to rescue themselves.”

He also found himself wrestling with the fire service’s deeply ingrained value of perseverance. In operational settings, you never give up on a casualty. By contrast, the constraints of charitable counselling services (where clients may receive only six or eight sessions) felt ethically and emotionally uncomfortable. Accepting these boundaries required another fundamental shift in Steve’s mindset.

Redefining the Eight-Pointed Star

Currently, Steve researches how the values forged in high-risk environments are not abandoned during career transition, but transformed, which he titled Crossing the Threshold. Using the eight-pointed star – the traditional symbol of the fire service – he maps how core traits evolve within the therapeutic context.

• Observation shifts from hypervigilance to mindful presence.
• Sympathy matures into regulated empathy. 
• Tact moves from command-based authority to relational influence. 
• Gallantry is redefined as the courage to tolerate uncertainty, rather than the need for decisive action.

Steve says: “When consciously reworked, these values become resources for ethical awareness, relational depth, and sustainable therapeutic practice.” Through this lens, he reframes his professional history not as something to overcome, but as something to consciously adapt.

A New Chapter of Service

Entering the world of counselling, Steve explains, is often marked by disruption and disorientation, accompanied by a temporary loss of professional certainty. For former first responders, the transition can feel like standing on unfamiliar ground without the armour of rank or command.

Yet, through supervision, reflection, and supportive professional spaces, identity can be reconstructed rather than replaced. Instead of a loss of self, Steve sees this transition as a continuation of service in a different form.

His journey suggests that while “big boys” may once have been told not to cry, it is precisely the capacity to feel, reflect and stay present with uncertainty that enables deeper and more ethical therapeutic work.

If you would like to get in touch with Steve, please reach out to him via email.

How the UK police force is transforming mental health support for its officers

Policing is a profession that demands not only physical strength but also immense mental resilience. Over the past two decades, the demands on police officers have changed tremendously and so has the conversation around mental health in policing. 

To understand this shift, Nordic Wellbeing Academy spoke with Professor John Harrison, National Police Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales. His work has been pivotal in shifting the culture from one of silence and stigma to one of openness and support and how mental resilience is being prioritised in modern policing. 

The Challenges: Stigma, Culture, and Evolving Demands

Historically, policing has been dominated by a “macho culture”, where emotional vulnerability is often seen as weakness. Officers relied on coping mechanisms like dark humor, alcohol, or simply bottling up their feelings. As John notes: “Police and fire services have quasi-militaristic structures with macho cultures that historically ignored emotional feelings.”

This culture created a significant stigma around mental health, leaving many officers feeling isolated. The problem was compounded by the fact that policing itself has evolved dramatically. Where officers once dealt primarily with traditional crimes, they now face complex issues like domestic abuse, sexual violence and online paedophilia – all of which carry a heavy psychological burden.

Another challenge is the lack of experience among newer officers. John points out that around 25% of officers today have less than five years of service, meaning they often lack the maturity and coping skills to handle the traumas they encounter.

Building Resilience: From Individual to Organisational Support

John explains, “Peer support networks allow officers to speak with colleagues who understand their experiences. This creates a sense of camaraderie and trust, which is essential for breaking down barriers to seeking help.”

Additionally, external networks of trauma therapists have been established to provide specialised care, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). These therapies are designed to help officers process trauma and build resilience.

While individual resilience is critical, John emphasises that organisational resilience is equally important. This means creating a work environment that supports mental wellbeing through policies, training, and leadership. He states, “We’re shifting from focusing solely on individual resilience to building organisational resilience. This involves training managers to recognise signs of stress in their teams and fostering a culture where wellbeing is prioritised.”

Increasingly, data analytics play a crucial role, too. By tracking metrics like sickness absence, burnout rates, and presenteeism, the police force can identify trends and tailor their support programmes more effectively.

The Future of Mental Health in Policing

As John puts it: “We’re trying to embed the concept of wellbeing in our workforces, with leadership from everybody in policing from a wellbeing perspective.”The goal is to create a culture where mental health is not just discussed but actively supported – where officers feel empowered to seek help without fear of judgment. With continued effort, collaboration, and investment, the future of policing can be one where resilience and wellbeing are at the heart of the profession. For now, the message is simple: mental health matters, and in policing, it’s not just a personal issue – it’s an operational necessity.

As part of the MentaStress project, NWA visited Greater Copenhagen Fire Departmentin April 2025 and learned more about their history, transformational journey, and current landscape of psychosocial support. MentaStress aims to enhance mental health and stress management for first responders through augmented reality (AR) training.

More recently, NWA Senior Communication Advisor, Anna Gallinat, had the chance to interview Christian Hagelund Vangsgaard, firefighter and crew commander in Copenhagen, who is driving the change for more mental resilience on the job. 

In 2017, tragedy struck at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, when a terrorist attack killed 22 people and injured over 1,000. While the headlines focused on the victims and the perpetrator, a lesser-known aftermath unfolded quietly within the emergency services. A crew of firefighters called to the scene were denied entry due to misinformation and security protocols. Treated as an active shooter situation, the incident led police to hold back the fire crew – a decision that had deep psychological consequences.

“Not being allowed to do your job is one of the key factors for developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is what happened there,” explains Christian Hagelund Vangsgaard, Crew Commander for the Greater Copenhagen Fire Department.

Around 10 years ago, the Department started recognising that large-scale security incidents like terror attacks were no longer remote possibilities but real threats. Greater Copenhagen’s fire service launched a new wave of training programmes, which aimed not only at technical readiness but also at mental resilience.

The training initiative was spearheaded by Christian and his colleague Andreas Corell, who believed that modern emergency response demanded a new mindset. Firefighters were trained to handle high-stress, high-risk environments as well as how to process the psychological impact of those events. The goal: to prevent PTSD by addressing its root causes – lack of preparedness and the inability to act.

The biggest challenge wasn’t the technical component. It was changing a deeply ingrained culture. According to Christian: “The biggest part was not the technical preparation, like how to do a special kind of first aid. It was to change the mindset that these incidents are dangerous in a different way and that mental preparedness as well as resilience are big parts of it.”

In a traditionally stoic and physically demanding profession, change isn’t easy. The fire service, like many emergency organisations, has long been steeped in a culture that rewards toughness and discourages vulnerability.

  “Culture is a difficult thing to change, but not impossible.”

Christian Hagelund Vangsgaard

To shift the mindset, Christian began with leadership – his own. After each emergency call, his team holds a debrief. These start with a discussion of technical actions, but in more significant situations, they also include mental and psychological evaluations. As crew commander, Christian leads by example: “I feel it is my responsibility to set an example, not just on the technical side of a call, but also on the mental aspects of the job.” He usually begins by sharing how a particular incident affected him emotionally, which encourages others to do the same.

“We all get affected by something at some point in different ways. And it’s okay to get emotionally affected, because we’re not made of stone. We are whole human beings, not machines.”

Today, the Greater Copenhagen Fire Department includes mental resilience as a key part of its operating model. “The more you talk about it, the more you normalize it,” says Christian. His leadership has helped foster a culture that embraces emotional awareness alongside operational excellence. The shift from silence to dialogue, from suppression to resilience, is making the department stronger, better prepared and more human.

In the MentaStress project we had the a great meeting with the project partners in Copenhagen April 3-4. We discussed the key results from the end users surveys and the implications and needs to cover in the upcoming training material.

We also had a very insightful meeting at the Greater Copenhagen Fire Department to learn more about their history, transformational journey, and current landscape of psychosocial support. The Mentastress Project is working to build a stress management and mental health support programme for first responders with a new international training concept and material – this made this visit to the biggest and oldest fire department organisation in Europe extremely interesting.

Read more about the project here.

With project partners in Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Hungary, NWA was excited to join the kick off meeting in Limoges, France for the MentaStress project: Empowering First Responders for Better Mental Health in Crisis Situations.

The project is an innovative EU-wide initiative designed to both enhance first responders’  efficiency in emergencies and to support their mental well-being before and after.

The project will develop learning materials based on real life crisis events, and a multilingual platform to support the first responders and raise awareness. We will also explore and build augmented reality tools to create immersive stress-management training for first responders and carry out training in five EU countries to validate tools and content. This will help us build a comprehensive stress management guide.

MentaStress connects 9 partners across 7 EU countries, spans over 24 months and includes pilot programs, research, events, and seminars, creating an inclusive platform that targets broad engagement and sustainability.

We aim to shape policies in crisis management and mental health at both the national and EU levels. By fostering cross-sector cooperation, MentaStress will offer scalable and transferable training solutions, improving crisis response and mental health support for first responders and the community.