South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust
South Western Ambulance Service provide a wide range of emergency and urgent care services across a fifth of England covering Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and the former Avon area. We also provide Urgent Care Services across Dorset. Our mission is to respond quickly and safely to patients’ emergency and urgent care needs, at every stage of life, to reduce anxiety, pain and suffering.

Our work in suicide prevention
At the core of South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust is the health and well-being of our people and teams. Recognising the challenging and demanding environment our operational people and teams work within, our confidential in-house health and wellbeing support service. The Staying Well Service is supported by the wider People Directorate and Management Teams which ensures the mental and physical health of our employees is always our top priority.
The Staying Well Service has developed significantly since it was launched, having a range of proactive interventions, alternative therapies, and in-house support alongside the supportive sign posting service. This enables employees to access emotional support such as counselling, specialist trauma work and a range of other advice and information services. Aligned to the Staying Well Service we have over 115 Peer Support Guardians. In addition to this, the Staying Well Service promotes proactive ways in which our people can stay healthy by looking after their mental and physical health.
We have also trained 160 of our Managers and Peer Support Guardians in Mental Health First Aid. This is a two day programme designed to ensure we can identify when someone may be struggling with poor mental health, and then to signpost them to ensure they receive ongoing support and treatment.
When any member of our people is affected by suicide, we implement immediate and effective support. This will include a TRIM assessment or a referral to our Staying Well Service in order to determine whether trauma counselling is necessary. If a group of people are affected by suicide, we will arrange for our Management Teams, Head of Wellbeing and Red Poppy will hold local drop in and support sessions to encourage as many people as possible to ask for help, should they need it.

Our current priorities
Our priority is the wellbeing of our people, to enable them to be happy, healthy and fit, empowering them to thrive both in work but also in their lives outside of work.
As an Ambulance Trust we also priorities responding quickly and safely to patients emergency and urgent care needs, at every stage of life, to reduce anxiety, pain and suffering. In order to deliver this, we recognise having a workforce that is happy and healthy is of the upmost importance. This is evidence by the Health and Wellbeing Strategy that was launched within the previous 12 months, and that is delivered as part of our Staff Wellbeing Engagement Group.

Our current priorities
Our Trust faces the same challenges as all NHS Organisations, we are facing increased patient demand year on year with limited funds and in turn limited resources. This places greater pressure on our people and teams who can then feel tired or overwhelmed.
We have embraced the national mental health campaigns, which we continue to promote internally, alongside our own internal messages and initiatives. We believe mental health is now discussed more than ever, and so we continue to promote the importance of this to ensure our people and teams are able to look after themselves and their colleagues, as well as asking for help should they ever need it.
Because the majority of our people work operationally, there is a challenge in being able to fully engage with them and share all of our proactive initiatives. We are currently considering ways in which we can improve our engagement to ensure all people and teams can get involved in our various campaigns and important messaging.