What the ‘Every Life’ Plan Means for the Future of Suicide Prevention in Queensland
“Suicide is everyone’s business, but not everyone’s business is the same”
- Every Life Suicide Prevention Plan
Suicide has a profound impact on individuals, families and communities. It affects all ages and people from all walks of life. As rates of deaths by suicide increase, effective suicide prevention is arguably one of the most important challenges facing Queensland today.
In a new wave of suicide prevention policies and activities aiming to stem the growing rate of suicide, the Queensland Mental Health Commission (QMHC) have recently released Every life, the Queensland Suicide Prevention Plan for 2019-2029 (the Plan). Phase One of three commenced in September 2019 and will continue to 2022.
While I could very easily explore each of the phases and actions areas above in-depth, this isn’t that kind of blog post.
Rather, I want to get into the interesting stuff - what does the plan mean for your organisation and clients, what may be in store for the next few years for intervention funding and what might be worth considering and preparing for?
Phase One of the Every Life Suicide Prevention Plan. Image sourced from Queensland Mental Health Commission (2019).
Let’s go.
First and foremost, the first phase of this plan is backed by the 2019-2020 Queensland state budget which commits $80.1 million over four years for suicide prevention initiatives.
Some key investments outlined in this budget for suicide prevention, include:
Development of Safe Spaces - Safe Haven Cafes
Community mental health investments - especially services delivered by non-government organisations
Crisis ‘chair’ facility
Expansion of The Way Back Support Service
Mental health and wellbeing in schools
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Project
Service reform, evaluation and redesign
Now let’s look at the Plan across the following time spans:
Short term (1st year) - tender tender tender!
What will happen:
This will be the first year of the four years of funding. As I’m not privy to exactly what form this funding will take, I can’t say for certain whether the funding will be available in the form of tenders, grants or allocated through a direct approach, however, my best guess would be on the first one.
Either way, one thing you can be assured of is that this first year will be quite hectic with organisations scrambling to secure as many opportunities as possible and lock themselves into some funding for the next four years.
How to prepare:
Start thinking early about what types of services you might be able to provide or are already running that fit in with the key investments I described above. Contact your in-house grant and tender writer (or reach out to the Beacon Strategies team) and start having those conversations with potential partner organisations. Plan exactly what you will be able to deliver down to the minute detail - this will make responding to the tenders you see much faster and easier too. Don’t be afraid to really question your ideas and think about doing them differently until you’ve come up with something innovative that meets your organisation’s and client needs. Also, ensure there is a definite need for your service, check the data, engage with your community, consult with key stakeholders. In essence, get prepared.
Medium term (2-3 years) - applications have closed, now let's get to work
What will happen:
By this stage, most opportunities will have wrapped up and funding will have been distributed. There might still be some tenders floating around that have been extended and some final contracts still being negotiated, but by and large most of the tendering will have stopped. From here on the next two years are about work and delivering the contracted services.
If you were successful in tendering then congratulations! It’s time to get stuck in!
How to prepare:
Unfortunately, this stage will be pretty quiet and if you missed out in the first year - it is unlikely there will be more funding available. My advice for this stage is to keep your ear to the ground for any potential opportunities that open up such as partnering with an organisation that was successful, as well as taking the time to seek feedback on why your application was unsuccessful. Also, take this time to fine-tune and tweak your original idea, making sure to incorporate that feedback.
Long term (4+ years) - and that’s a wrap!
What will happen:
By now, most of those contracts awarded in the first year will be starting to conclude, and seeing as the evaluation phase (Phase Two) is about to commence, service delivery will start to slow down and finish up. Some fortunate organisations might even get their funding renewed (depending on their success of course!). This is when we should also start to take into account the other part of Phase Two, refresh and renew actions. Essentially, based on those evaluations as well as a whole lot of economic analysis, I’m sure this will be when more funding is allocated - so I would predict that the whole process will start again.
How to prepare:
I would recommend doing some similar things to the short term phase - start to plan new services in preparation for new rounds of funding, but also keep up to date with the evaluations of major pieces of work. Find out the good, the bad and the ugly from other interventions delivered and apply these learnings to any services you’re planning.
If you were successful in the first year with securing a tender, I would recommend thinking about whether or not you will want to try tendering again with the same or improved service model (that is if you haven’t been offered more funding already) and prepare to enter the tendering arena once again.
And there you have it!
While this may not be exactly what happens over the next few years, I’d say it’s pretty darn close.
As a mission-based health and social services consultancy, Beacon Strategies has extensive experience in supporting organisations to complete any of the recommendations in this blog post. We’ve spent years planning and designing services, writing and winning tenders and grants, as well as implementing and evaluating interventions. If you need help with anything covered in this post, please reach out to me by email or using the form below - we’re always willing to have a chat to help however we can.
I hope this blog has given you some insight as to what will happen over the coming years and good luck with the inevitable tendering to come.
References:
Every life, the Queensland Suicide Prevention Plan 2019-2029, 2019