Cairns Suicide Prevention Community Action Plan - Trip 2
Trip 2 (December 2020)
As you’d know, as part of the Cairns and Hinterland Suicide Prevention Community Action Plan (SP-CAP), the Beacon Strategies team are engaging local stakeholders throughout its development. The primary purpose of these engagements is to ensure the plan results in a sector endorsed path forward for coordinated suicide prevention activities across the region.
To begin the local engagements, Elliot and Sarah made a trip to Cairns at the end of 2020 to meet with key stakeholders to develop this locally specific SP-CAP.
Who attended the sessions?
This trip focused on engaging sector professionals across the suicide prevention space in the Cairns and Hinterland region. This included anyone working in the suicide prevention sector, including community organisations, mental health professionals, peer support workers, other healthcare professionals and first responders.
In total, this trip gained insights from 51 participants through a series of 5 sessions across the Cairns and Hinterland region including:
Atherton (11 attendees)
Cairns North (18 attendees)
Cairns South (11 attendees)
Innisfail (6 attendees)
Mossman (5 attendees)
Individuals who were engaged in these sessions represented a range of different organisations, some of which included:
StandBy - Support After Suicide
Queensland Health
NEAMI National
Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships
Mission Australia
Selectability
Local community centres
Local Councils
Local schools
Why did we engage local sector professionals?
Local sector professionals were able to provide insight on local issues and trends regarding suicide in the Cairns and Hinterland region. Combining their perspectives along with other stakeholder groups enables the project team to gain a thorough understanding of what coordinated suicide prevention activities should look like in the region.
What was the structure of the sessions?
Source: Black Dog Institute, LifeSpan: Integrated Suicide Prevention
Workshops began with an introduction to the project, an outline of Suicide Prevention Community Action Plans, consultation findings so far and Black Dog Institute’s LifeSpan Framework.
Using the 9 components of BDI’s LifeSpan framework, attendees were asked to work through the two questions relating to each strategy:
What are the biggest issues?
What should be put in place locally?
a. Who should be responsible?
b. How will we know when it has been achieved? (KPI)
c. Is the activity already happening?
What did we hear?
From these workshops, several common ‘solutions’ for the 9 components of BDI’s LifeSpan framework are outlined below:
Communication pathways in the community
Holistic supports
The necessity of flexible supports
Promote and increase the accessibility of youth health supports
More networking and collaboration opportunities within the community
Where to from here?
But wait! There are more consultations to be done.
Whilst we gained lots of great insight from this trip, the project team have plans to go back up to Cairns to engage a broader range of stakeholders including those with a lived experience of suicidal crisis or attempt, caring for someone through a suicide crisis, or have been bereaved by suicide; people who identify as, or work with members of the LGBTQIAP+ community; and workers and community leaders of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
If you want to stay up to date on the outcomes of these engagements or are interested in becoming more involved with this project, be sure to fill out the form below to sign up for the email list for this project.