World Suicide Prevention Day
We’re marking World Suicide Prevention Day (today, Tuesday 10 September 2019) with a huge push to reduce the amount of people dying by suicide across our region.
We’re the lead partner for suicide prevention across the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership and we have adopted a ‘zero suicide’ ambition as a Trust for our inpatient areas.
Zero suicide is the approach that one life lost to suicide is one too many and that suicides are preventable and never inevitable. NHS England has been working with mental health trusts nationally to implement zero suicide policies for inpatient areas and improve the safety on our wards.
We’re proud to be a member organisation of the Zero Suicide Alliance. This is a collaborative of NHS trusts, businesses and individuals who are all committed to suicide prevention in the UK and beyond.
In March 2019, we evaluated our suicide prevention strategy and began to take a number of steps towards developing a zero suicide inpatient action plan together with a wider improvement plan to address suicide prevention across all our services.
Organisationally we believe that the care for our service users is a continuous journey from accessing support at the earliest point of intervention, to receiving high quality evidenced based care created in partnership with staff who are confident in their skill set and supported by their management team to deliver safe and effective care and treatment.
Our improvement plan and zero suicide ambition statement will be launched imminently. In the meantime we are asking our staff to join the 241,699 members of the public who have completed the zero suicide alliance ‘20 minutes to save a life’ training.
Michael Doyle, Deputy Director of Nursing and Quality, said: “We believe that even one life lost to suicide is one too many. As well as a new improvement plan and statement, we’re recruiting a network of champions across the Trust and asking everyone to take the save a life training. It takes just 20 minutes to save a life, so take the training.”
Anyone can access the zero suicide training online
