Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust
We are Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust. We provide a wide range of adult mental health and learning disability services to our local population of 1.8 million people in Kent and Medway, as well as specialist services for adults in Sussex and Surrey. Each year we care for over 2,000 people in our hospitals and 54,000 people in the community. We are proud to employ over 3,600 people from 66 nationalities, and to serve an increasingly diverse range of communities across rural and urban areas.

Our work in suicide prevention
We are part of the Kent and Medway Integrated Care System, a partnership of organisations that come together to plan and deliver joined up health and care services to improve the lives of people across Kent and Medway.
We actively develop research to prevent suicide and to understand our patient cohort, including research to explore if there are any barriers relating to minority groups in accessing mental health services.
We have a suicide prevention approach that outlines our aims to prevent suicide in Kent and Medway. With just under 30% of all people who die by suicide in Kent and Medway being known to secondary care services, risk management and suicide prevention is an integral part of our work.
We provide a compassionate response for people who feel suicidal and to those affected by suicide. This includes families and staff. We complete regular reviews into KMPT suicides to identify themes relating to suicide. We also work collaboratively with external partners both locally and nationally to learn from our data and to jointly work on projects in suicide prevention and harm reduction.
We hold in-house training in suicide prevention and risk management to our staff, and have been recognised as leading the way with our training. We have been supporting other Trusts and private services in the development of their work through Culture of Care.

Our motivation for joining the NSPA
Kent and Medway are above the national average for suicide and we want to ensure we are doing all that we can to reduce the numbers by preventing suicides. We also recently heard about the great work the NSPA do at a recent suicide prevention annual conference, and were even more inspired to join as members, and be a part of this incredible community.
We are really keen to expand our network of suicide prevention colleagues to share best practice and so that we can learn from each other. We are also motivated to have an impact on data quality, and to improve how patient demographics are identified and recorded, as we recognise we have limited data of some high-priority groups, such as patients who are LGBTQ+.

Our areas of expertise
Delivering specific training to our staff in assessment and management of risk, through our in house Clinical Risk Assessment and Management (CRAM).
We have colleagues who are going through their Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) accreditation.
We also have expertise in research into suicide and suicide prevention, as well as providing mental health care to individuals who live in Kent and Medway.
