Is laughter the best medicine?

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Laughter Yoga - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Courier - NHS Tayside sending staff on £350-a-head laughter courses

NHS Tayside sending staff on £350-a-head laughter courses

NHS Tayside are having a laugh as part of a £166,000 bid to promote staff health and wellbeing.

The organisation now has a certified laughter yoga leader and is planning to send four more people for training this month.

The trained laughter leaders will then hold chuckle sessions for staff across Tayside.

NHS Tayside is paying £350 per person for the two-day training programme, cash that comes from a Scottish Government fund set up to benefit the NHS staff's health and wellbeing. NHS Tayside was awarded £166,100 from the fund.

The laughter leader courses are delivered by Joyworks. It was the first organisation to offer laughter workshops in Scotland, using it for team building and therapy.

Director Sharon Miller said: "Laughter really is the best medicine. Lots of research has been done in India and America that proves that."

She said her work can be met with cynicism but people are quickly won over.

She said: "People wonder why you would laugh for no reason but when you see the results, and see how quickly people bond together and how quickly people's moods change, there is nothing more powerful than that."

Joyworks has held sessions in other Scottish health board areas but NHS Tayside is the first to send staff on laughter leader courses.

Ms Miller said: "It is lovely they want to train up laughter yoga leaders and stunning they are taking this a step forward investing in their own staff and making it sustainable.

"The idea is that as well as doing in-house team-building and stress-busting sessions for staff, they are going to have an after-work laughter yoga club in Perth, Dundee and Kinross where staff can go and de-stress, connect and energise."

She added: "We do a lot of corporate work and, over the last two months, 100% of staff have felt de-stressed and energised after the sessions."

She quoted Brian Blake, NHS Tayside's first trained laughter yoga leader, who said that he delivered a laughter session to 30 NHS managers "who were still smiling at the end of the day."

A health board spokesman said: "NHS Tayside made a successful bid to the Scottish Government's Working Well Challenge Fund two years ago and was awarded £166,100 to set up Working Well Tayside, which is a programme aimed at all staff to address issues that affect staff health, wellbeing and safety.

"It also encourages health boards to work collaboratively, both within and outwith the sector, to develop innovative and effective ways of maximising staff potential."

The spokesman added: "Over the past two years, Working Well Tayside has offered many health and wellbeing sessions to staff outwith work hours. These include resilience building to combat stress, Mentally Healthy workplace training, an online ment

[Arwen]

They could save themselves the money and send those folk feeling blue to work at my place. We're always laughing.