Suicide prevention

Reducing suicide and self harm in the health community

Suicide prevention is one of the National Patient Safety Agency’s 10 for 2010 programmes – 10 topic areas with a clear strategy for implementing good practice and interventions aimed at reducing avoidable harm.

The focus of the suicide prevention programme is the health community. This is an important area to focus on because 96% of patient suicides take place in the community and 74% of suicides are of that not in touch with the mental health service in the previous 12 months.

In addition, there is increasing complexity in terms of discharge planning and problems of communication between primary to secondary mental health services.

How to
Case studies
Resources
Network

The Suicide prevention programme's vision is to reduce the number of suicides and incidents in self-harm in the health community by:

Supporting the NHS to implement an inpatient suicide prevention toolkit
Improving the culture and leadership of the care programme approach
Work with key stakeholders to adopt existing standards into tools.

Evidence based:

Self-harm is one of the top five causes of acute medical admissions in the UK each year
Mental health conditions cost approximately £77 billion a year
A high percent of suicides occur in the community that are not known to mental health services.

Coming soon...

Resources available

Title	Type	Size
Inpatient suicide prevention toolkit	link	n/a
Adolescent mental health e-learning tool	link	n/a
Article: Learning from prevented suicide in psychiatric inpatient care - an analysis of data from the NPSA	pdf	290kb

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