Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Our Trust has 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 and providing meaningful, effective and compassionate care.

Our work complements national and local suicide prevention strategies to promote working together to prevent suicide.

How does your organisation contribute to preventing suicide and supporting those affected by it?

Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (Nottinghamshire Healthcare) is committed to working ‘Towards Zero Suicide’. This approach aims to improve the care and safety of people accessing our services, and support suicide prevention work within local communities.

Towards Zero Suicide is our commitment to suicide prevention and providing compassionate, person-centred care which is based on evidence, clinical knowledge and collaborative decision making. Our Zero Suicide ambition means that we have a commitment to suicide prevention and promoting a culture that focuses on learning, improvement, personalisation and safety, rather than blame and “defensive” practice.

What are your current priorities?

We have developed a framework for working ‘Towards Zero Suicide’ with four areas of focus; Community and Partnerships, Clinical practice and pathways, Just Culture and Clinical competence. Our current priorities sit under each of these areas of the framework:

Community and Partnerships

– Promote networks, both internal and external to the Trust, and evidence this through involvement with local, regional and national groups and initiatives

– Monitor self-harm and suicide data, particularly through the Trust’s incident reporting, mortality surveillance, and real time surveillance of suspected suicides in partnership with Public Health

Clinical practice and pathways

– Promote good practice relating to suicide prevention, particularly that involving risk assessment, effective care and safety planning, through Quality Improvement activity and staff engagement

– Implement a strategic approach to suicide prevention in inpatient areas

– Develop resources and communication tools to share knowledge, understanding and lived experience trust wide

Just Culture

– Embed the principles of restorative practice to enable learning from incidents, promote a culture of safety and enabling staff to speak up

Clinical competence

– Review staff support and needs relating to suicide prevention, promote a skilled compassionate workforce through supervision and ensure staff know where to access support and advice

– Review Suicide and Self harm prevention training and implement a new training model in collaboration with people who have lived experience

What challenges are you currently facing?

Implementation of the Towards Zero Suicide ambition and strategy is a key challenge in recognition of being a large Trust with a variety of areas and services, and in relation to other work being undertaken currently across the Trust to design and create our culture of compassionate leadership.

The Trust has already begun this work by completing consultation on Building our Purpose, Values and Behaviours Together.

This is one element of work ongoing within the Trust of which other elements include:

– Ensuring we have a staff Health and Wellbeing service that is fit for purpose

– Ensuring HR Policies and processes allow for a more Just Culture approach. We are committed to moving towards moving towards a learning culture and away from a blame culture in order to support staff when they are involved in an incident, allegation or formal process/procedure

– Utilising a Breaking the Rules for Better Care methodology as developed by the Institute for Health Improvement (IHI) which has been used by other Trusts across the UK. The process of ‘Breaking the Rules for Better Care’ is a focus on rapid identification and decision making.

– Holding Trustwide events based on the above