As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly write a mental health policy for your UK employees.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the relevant mental health, employment and workplace guidance on GOV.UK, and open NHS 111 guidance for the employee support wording you may need.
   2. Gather your existing absence, equality, safeguarding, grievance, disciplinary, flexible-working and data-handling policies, plus your actual support contacts and occupational health arrangements.
   3. Fill in the organisation details in the prompt, paste the relevant policy extracts, and remove personal health information and unnecessary employee-identifying data.
   4. Paste the complete prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask it to produce the policy and keep every unknown item marked [TO CONFIRM].
   5. Compare each factual statement and proposed commitment against your current procedures and the GOV.UK material you opened, then replace placeholders with confirmed contacts, routes and responsibilities.
   6. Send the draft, source links and implementation checklist to the policy owner and an HR or UK employment-law reviewer, then record approval before publishing it to employees.
   7. Publish the approved policy with the named contact route, brief managers on their responsibilities, and set the review reminder recorded in the policy.

   Prompt

   Draft a mental health policy for a UK organisation.
   
   Organisation details:
   - Organisation name: [name]
   - Sector and main work activities: [details]
   - Number and types of workers: [details]
   - Locations and working arrangements: [office, remote, hybrid, mobile or other]
   - Existing HR, absence, safeguarding and equality policies: [paste or describe]
   - Available support, contacts and occupational health arrangements: [details]
   - Policy owner and approval route: [details]
   - Review date or review interval: [details]
   
   Write a practical employee-facing policy with these headings: purpose, scope, principles, responsibilities, prevention and working conditions, recognising concerns without diagnosing anyone, how employees can ask for support, manager response, adjustments and return to work, confidentiality and privacy, absence and emergency escalation, unacceptable conduct, record keeping, complaints, monitoring, related policies, external support, approval and review.
   
   Use plain British English. Do not diagnose, assess or label any employee. Do not promise confidentiality where information may need to be shared for safety, legal or operational reasons. Do not invent contacts, services, legal duties, statistics or internal procedures. Mark every missing detail as [TO CONFIRM]. Distinguish policy commitments from optional good practice. Flag statements that need checking against current UK requirements and reliable government guidance, and include source links only when you can verify them. Treat this as a drafting aid, not legal advice. End with a short implementation checklist and a list of questions for an HR or UK employment-law reviewer. The employee-facing text must direct urgent or worrying symptoms to NHS 111 and must not provide diagnosis.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.