NSPLG welcomes new Suicide Prevention Strategy and Action Plan
Scotland’s National Suicide Prevention Leadership Group (NSPLG) today welcomes the launch of the Scottish Government and COSLA’s new, joint long-term Suicide Prevention Strategy and Action Plan.
It follows recommendations made by NSPLG in June 2020, which included that the Scottish Government and COSLA should collaborate to develop a long-term strategy for preventing suicide, based on a cross-policy approach and a focus on outcomes. What has been launched today follows a very extensive period of consultation.
The new strategy looks at wider issues beyond mental health which also have a role to play in suicide prevention. These include the impact of social inequalities, policies on issues such as employment, housing, and how experiencing poverty can affect a person’s life circumstances and risk of suicide.
Children & young people are also at the heart of the new strategy, with education a key component of this approach. NSPLG has established a new Youth Advisory Group to support this work.
NSPLG, its Lived Experience Panel (LEP) members and Academic Advisory Group (AAG) have been extensively involved in supporting development of the new strategy and action plan.
They are all committed to continuing to bring together the best of professional, lived and academic experience to advise both the Scottish Government and COSLA in the delivery of the new strategy.
This will include people with experience in some of the wider issues the new strategy will address.
At the invitation of the Minister for Mental Health and Social Care Kevin Stewart MSP, Rose Fitzpatrick CBE QPM will continue to chair NSPLG.
She comments: “We warmly welcome Scotland’s new suicide prevention strategy.
“Four years ago, we came together to form the National Suicide Prevention Leadership Group, its Lived Experience Panel and Academic Advisory Group in order to support the delivery of Scotland’s Suicide Prevention Action Plan. We are privileged to have had that opportunity and now to have positively influenced the development of the new strategy.
“We have always been clear that suicide prevention must be everyone’s business. In recommending that the Scottish Government and COSLA jointly develop a long-term approach to reduce suicide we took the view that the strategy must connect across Scotland’s public policy and service delivery, and we are glad to see this set out today.
“This is particularly important at a time when both the long-term legacy of the pandemic and the current cost of living crisis are having a significant impact on the life circumstances and mental wellbeing of so many people.
“It is important that Scotland’s new suicide prevention strategy recognises these risks, and is ambitious in its plans to tackle them.
“Our experience over the last four years is that culture can change, stigma around suicide can be reduced and that by working with people who have experienced the impact and tragedy of suicide, we can all have a role to play in saving lives from suicide and the heartbreak it brings.
“There is of course an enormous amount of work to be done over the next 10 years. Ensuring that no suicide in Scotland is inevitable is both complex and challenging. It will require a strong commitment to delivery and resourcing.
“For our part, as members of the NSPLG, its Lived Experience Panel and Academic Advisory Group, we will all continue to do our very best to advise on and support the Scottish Government, COSLA and other partners in the delivery of Scotland’s new suicide prevention strategy and in saving lives.”
In October 2015, Seonaid Stallan lost her son Dylan to suicide. Three weeks later her sister in law Vanessa took her life.
Seonaid welcomes the new strategy, saying: “I am pleased to see that with the launch of the new strategy comes an ambitious vision and commitment to reducing suicide in Scotland over the next 10 years.
“As someone who has lost two family members to suicide, I would be disappointed if the new strategy was not ambitious. However, with current social and economic difficulties, where resources and workforces are stretched, delivering this ambitious vision has never been more important or more challenging.
“Tackling the many known risk factors for suicide such as those in poverty, marginalised or minority groups will require years of political and economic change, so I am pleased that the new strategy recognises the significant impact that other policy areas can have on people’s mental well-being.
“A consistent awareness of and support for suicide prevention across the policy landscape is absolutely essential and even more so in the current cost of living crisis.
“Having spent the last three years working with the NSPLG as a member of the LEP I am also pleased that the strategy makes a commitment to continued lived experience participation.
“Partnership working and co-production with people with lived experience of suicidal thoughts including children and young people, their families, and the third sector that deliver support to people in communities, will be vital in achieving real and transformational change.
“Since losing my son Dylan to suicide almost seven years ago, progress in suicide prevention has been much slower than I would like and there are still too many deaths by suicide in Scotland. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy and leaves behind devastated families and communities.
“However, we all have a responsibility to shift the culture and make suicide prevention everyone’s business and I remain hopeful that the written commitments in both the Strategy and Action plan will in time become practice, and that timely and compassionate support will be available and accessible to everyone who needs it.
“In order to achieve this, the focus must now be on the finer detail of implementation and accountability.”
Stephen Platt, Emeritus Professor of Health Policy Research at the University of Edinburgh and co-chair of NSPLG’s Academic Advisory Group welcomes the way the new strategy has been designed.
He adds: “I very much welcome the Scottish Government’s articulation of long-term outcomes in the new strategy and their commitment to meeting these outcomes through an ‘outcomes-focused approach’.
“The implication of such an approach for the delivery of preventative actions is recognised: an outcomes-focused strategy requires outcomes-focused implementation.
“This strategy is to be directed towards the achievement of short-, medium- and long-term outcomes via a set of actions which are selected on the basis of up-to-date academic evidence of effectiveness and lived experience.
“In other words, the actions will flow from the strategic outcomes, rather than vice versa. The long-term outcomes are set out in the strategy. The short- and medium-term outcomes are under development and will be published subsequently as part of a detailed ‘logic model’, which will illustrate how resources will be translated into activities and outputs which, in turn, will result in (short-, medium- and long-term) outcomes.”
