Cairns and Hinterland Suicide Prevention Community Action Plan Community Advisory Group Meeting - March
Wondering what the Suicide Prevention Community Action Plan Community Action Group meetings look like?
At the end of March, our team held the Community Advisory Group meeting: co-design session 1.
Within this meeting, we identified issues and ideas surrounding suicide in the Cairns and Hinterland region communities. A brief outline of the agenda is detailed below:
We asked, “What are the issues locally regarding suicide in the community?” and discussed this as a group.
From this, we moved into a structured conversation where ideas for action aligned to the LifeSpan model were the point of discussion.
Finally, to close out the meeting we discussed the next steps in the process.
How the meeting was run
On Tuesday the 30th of March, our team remotely met with the Community Advisory Group via Zoom. To keep the broader sector and community informed about what we discussed, we have summarised the outcomes of this meeting below.
High-level summary of local issues regarding suicide in the community:
A number of key themes arose from the conversation, including:
Stigma is often experienced and a key barrier to reaching out for support
Community awareness/lack of knowledge around who does what
Remoteness and social isolation/lack of access to services
Impact of COVID-19 on accessibility to supports (travel and waitlists)
No integrated/unified approach
Lack of education around suicide
Understaffed supports due to lack of funding
Source: Black Dog Institute, LifeSpan: Integrated Suicide Prevention
Ideas for action (based on BDI’s LifeSpan Framework)
As mentioned earlier, the Community Advisory Group workshopped ideas for action, aligned to the Black Dog Institute’s LifeSpan framework. A summary of frequently mentioned ideas for actions are listed below and categorised by the domain of the LifeSpan framework that they relate to.
Strategy 1: Improve emergency and follow up care for suicidal crisis
Consistent discharge processes that prioritise the individual receiving support
Increase suicide specific training for ED staff
Include peer support workers in ED
Strategy 2: Using evidence-based treatment for suicidality
Suicide specific support group sessions
Programs with a sufficient number of sessions and follow-up
Online resources and access to things like web chat
Strategy 3: Equipping primary care to identify and support people in distress
Education around existing guidelines to support primary care workers to identify and support people in distress
Formal training in assessing risk, counselling and brief interventions
Continuing to fund existing programs that GPs can refer to
Cultural awareness training for primary care providers
Strategy 4: Improving the competency and confidence of frontline workers to deal with suicidal crisis
Co-responders to assist first responders
Emergency/crisis and critical intervention training for frontline workers
Utilise lived experience to tailor training
Strategy 5: Promoting help-seeking, mental health and resilience in schools
Consistent approaches in schools to reduce stigma about help-seeking
Consistent processes to provide age-appropriate education and training in schools
Strategy 6: Training the community to recognise and respond to suicidality
Utilise informal settings to provide wellbeing and resilience training to reduce stigma and reach broad groups(e.g. involving sporting groups/agencies)
Develop localised community networks to identify who’s doing what
Engage community leaders to provide input on appropriate training for culturally diverse communities
Strategy 7: Engaging the community and providing opportunities to be part of the change
Regular community events (making use of pertinent days of the calendar e.g. R U OK day)
Encourage involvement from a range of diverse communities
Engage influential members of the community (e.g. community leaders and business owners) to act as mentors and spread awareness
Flexible approach from service providers to help adhere to community needs
Strategy 8: Encouraging safe and purposeful media reporting
Media training to promote positive messaging and discussions
Media reporting working group with a close relationship to media outlets
‘Safe story telling’ course
Strategy 9: Improving safety and reducing access to means of suicide
No suggestions were workshopped for Strategy 9 however the majority of work has already been done for this strategy with Black Dog Institute completing a suicide audit for the local Cairns and Hinterland communities.
If you have any additional insights you think could be useful in the identification of issues and ideas surrounding suicide in communities across the Cairns and Hinterland region we would love to hear from you! Shoot us an email via info@beaconstrategies.net or sign up to the newsletter for this project below.