Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide

We are a charity that seeks to support those bereaved by suicide through our telephone and email helplines and support groups. We have 52 of these throughout the country.

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

Our aim is to support those bereaved by suicide. We do this through our telephone and email helplines. Our telephone helpline is open Monday to Friday from 9am to 9pm. The email helpline is email.support@uksobs.org and is open 24 hours.
We trust that by this support we help prevent suicides in the bereaved by suicide. The support groups offer our main support with 52 groups throughout the country. People can react with others like themselves and discuss their problems, difficulties and heartache.

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What are your current priorities?

Increase our groups

Although we have 52 groups throughout England, Scotland and Wales, they are not enough to cover the needs of our clients. This requires training of volunteers and setting up of groups with venues etc. We hope to have 60 groups by the end of 2015.

Initiate support groups in Northern Ireland

One of our Trustees has visited Northern Ireland and we hope to set up groups there and have more volunteers to help with our telephone helpline.

Increase the number of those volunteering on the telephone helpline

Our telephone helpline is grossly under-staffed and we need to have many more volunteers working on this much used facility. This requires advertising, assessing and training.

Initiate an online forum

We are at this time enquiring into setting up a forum for people to discuss online their problems, fears and successes thus supporting one another. We also need to train moderators for this to function well and safely.

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What challenges are you currently facing?

We have 5 main challenges at this time.

1. To increase our groups throughout the nation. This requires volunteers to lead the groups and training. Suitable venues also need to be found.

2. To increase the number of volunteers helping on the telephone helpline.

3. To set up an online forum.

4. To develop and enhance our in-house training.

5. The restructure of our organisation to have a membership and an AGM.

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