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Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
We are the leading provider of mental health, learning disabilities and substance misuse services in Derby city and Derbyshire county. We also provide a wide range of children’s services. We employ over 2,400 staff based in over 60 locations across the whole of Derbyshire. Across the county and the city, we serve a combined population of approximately one million people.
We have a clear vision for the Trust, underpinned by objectives that serve as the basis for decision making and forward planning. Our vision and objectives guide us in how we balance the interests of patients, the local community and other stakeholders.
Our strapline, ‘Better Together’ reflects the Trust’s ethos of collaborative working, with our service users, carers, partners and staff to collectively improve health and wellbeing.
How does your organisation contribute to preventing suicide and supporting those affected by it?
Derbyshire Healthcare Foundation Trust have developed a trust wide Suicide Prevention Strategy, written in consultation with key stakeholders, it sets out our aims for reducing the incidence of suicide across the Trust. Using the National Suicide Prevention Strategy as our anchor, and through reference to the countywide Derbyshire Suicide Prevention Partnership Strategy, the document describes key strategic aims, and ways to achieve them.
Whilst reducing suicides in those who use our services sits at the heart of our strategy, we are mindful of the need to promote engagement with those outside our service, and our approach must be suitably wide-ranging; a strategy that does not consider how we can work collaboratively with statutory, third sector, and other key groups cannot hope to address this complex issue in its entirety.
What are your current priorities?
Top 10 priorites:
1. Develop a strategic approach to self-harm across all areas of the Trust.
2. Support frontline workers with suicide prevention training.
3. Offer suicide prevention safety planning and means restriction to individuals experiencing suicidal thoughts.
4. Increase identification of and relationship between physical health conditions amongst individuals with depression and other long-term mental health needs.
5. Exchange information about high-risk locations and Methods in Derbyshire with DSPPF and wider groups.
6. Reduce access to means in healthcare and other settings, especially opportunities for hanging and strangulation.
7. Promote staff education and awareness of importance of supporting those bereaved by suicide including staff.
8. Use opportunities like World Suicide Prevention Day (WSPD) to build community resilience.
9. Use communications approaches to promote support available to those in distress and those concerned about an individual e.g. WSPD.
10. Staff stigma – staff to feel able and supported to be open about their own mental health and wellbeing.
We hope to achieve our target that all clinical staff receive suicide awareness and response training. We have a cohort of supported trainers/facilitators and are delivering during the next 18 months. It is a trust requirement as part of compulsory training that all staff are trained in suicide awareness and response.
We are planning a significant community engagement on the day targeting men. Will be a presence at a local football match between Derby and Newcastle with a team of people from the local suicide forum giving information, raising awareness, providing brief interventions etc.
What challenges are you currently facing?
Within each strategic priority in the strategy, the document identifies important outcomes, and sets out ways in which we can not only achieve them, but also measure the extent to which they have been achieved. Through the incorporation of our DHCFT values and Core Care Standards, we intend the strategy to be truly accessible to every stakeholder. As such, the key message of the DHCFT Suicide Prevention Strategy is that we all have a part to play; suicide is everyone’s business.
This ambition is a key challenge that will need the energies of the strategy group, commitment by the trust and its staff as well as engagement and collaborative working across the local communities we serve, to be achieved.