Seafarers Awareness Week, 23^rd-30^th of June 2018, by the charity Seafarers UK, will embrace the IMO’s Day of the Seafarer on the 25^th of June.

The theme for Seafarers Awareness Week this year, will be ‘Maritime Industry Jobs’ – at sea and ashore – with emphasis on engineering. This is a sector that the Royal Navy, Royal Fleet Auxiliary and Merchant Navy are currently struggling to recruit people. This is to coincide with the UK Governments ‘Year of Engineering’ campaign.

Seafarers UK is partner #100 in the UK Governments ‘2018 – Year of Engineering’ campaign. Maritime businesses ashore and at sea, are desperate for qualified engineers. By embracing the ‘Year of Engineering’ campaign, Seafarers UK is ensuring that Seafarers Awareness Week will have a key role to play in raising awareness of maritime job opportunities.

As always, this year the Day of the Seafarer, falls within Seafarer Awareness Week and will address issues of seafarers’ wellbeing and their mental health.

In recent years seafarer’s mental health has been a growing topic of conversation which is now frequently talked about in the industry.

By addressing seafarer wellbeing and mental health, this campaign aims to inform specific strategies to tackle stress and other issues affecting seafarers’ mental conditions and make the tools available more widely known.

The campaign overall will seek to highlight and showcase best practises and good examples but also, inevitably, bring out areas of concern and examples of shortcomings.

As previously, the Day of the Seafarer 2018, will be feature on social media, in particular Twitter and Facebook. This year’s hashtags will be:

• #SupportSeafarersWellbeing – which is to be used by shipping companies and others within the industry, to show how they provide a decent working environment for seafarers and how they address mental health issues among their seagoing staff.
• #GoodDayatSea – This hashtag can be used by the general public, to wish them a good day at sea. The hashtag will also be used to encourage seafarers to share photos of themselves in a positive work environment, by completing the phrase “#GoodDayatSea looks like…”

At the core of the campaign IMO will make an online survey available to collect seafarers’ feedback on knowing their rights and if they feel those rights are being implemented into their operational reality.