Suicide prevention for mental health patients
A key focus area of the Suicide Prevention Programme is people who use mental health services. A third of people who die by suicide are in contact with services.
Here you’ll find links to relevant research about people who use mental health services who die by suicide and examples of good practice from local areas in the programme to prevent suicide in mental health patients.
Examples of good practice
- Cornwall and Isles of Scilly – Safety planning
- Coventry and Warwickshire – MindStance
- Mid and South Essex – Primary care training
- North East and North Cumbria – Connecting people with training
- Suffolk and North East Essex – Primary care training
Research and evidence
- Clinical characteristics and care pathways of patients with personality disorder who died by suicide (2020)
- Access to means of lethal overdose among psychiatric patients with co-morbid physical health problems: Analysis of national suicide case series data from the United Kingdom (2019)
- Learning from clinicians’ views of good quality practice in mental healthcare services in the context of suicide prevention: a qualitative study (2019)
- Opioid prescribing trends and geographical variation in England, 1998-2018: a retrospective database study (2019)
- The personality disorder patient pathway: Service user and clinical perspectives (2019)
- Comparison of the safety planning intervention with follow-up vs usual care of suicidal patients treated in the emergency department (2018)
- Implementation of mental health service recommendations in England and Wales and suicide rates, 1997-2006: a cross-sectional and before-and-after observational study (2012)
Based on over 20 years of research evidence from studies of mental health services, primary care and accident and emergency departments, NCISH have developed a list of 10 key elements for safer care for patients:
These recommendations have been shown to reduce suicide rates. If you are a mental health care provider, you can use the Safer Services toolkit, which is based on these 10 key elements, to evaluate your current suicide prevention efforts against NCISH recommendations.