Reducing military suicide in health and social care delivery: safety planning.

Description

Reducing military suicide in health and social care delivery: safety planning.

This workshop seeks to support care delivery organisations to assess, evaluate and develop their role in suicide reduction. Underpinned by the principles of compassionate leadership, the workshop facilitates a safe space and the opportunity for reflection and action planning.

The workshop will be 1-2 days in duration with the morning session focusing on engaging the delegates with the latest empirical evidence around military suicide and the causes. Following this, delegates will undertake a supported self-assessment exercise to evaluate their current policy, procedures and care in relation to suicide prevention. This is undertaken using the annex A workbook above that describes what ‘good’ looks like, so that organisations can evaluate themselves against it. What ‘good’ looks like has been developed from a series of x5 co-production workshops undertaken across the entire UK. The workshops engaged 180 participants from across the whole sector that cares for military veterans, from central government, to front line care staff, and those families that have been bereaved by military suicide. The One is too Many study is the most comprehensive study undertaken to date to look at the factors that contribute to military and veteran suicide. The afternoon of the workshop and day 2 will then be dedicated to action planning. Using a co-design approach delegates will work together to develop an action plan for their own organisation, with a focus on how they might use all resources available to them – a collaborative approach between state sector and the military charity sector.

The workshop was developed using the Universal Design for Learning principles to promote a positive learning environment and enable active and deeper learning throughout the day. The active learning approach facilitates involvement and engagement in learning by using activities that enable thinking, critical discussion, investigation, and creation. It not only involves delegates doing things, but also thinking about what they are doing and making those links to real world scenarios (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). The workshop can facilitate a maximum of twenty places per delivery and will be delivered to healthcare leaders.

To support the implementation of the toolkit we are adopting a successive approach to allow evaluations following the workshop. We would then like to invite attendees for an interview (in-person or on TEAMS) at one, three and six months to understand the implementation of your action plan developed during the workshop. We seek to understand delegates experiences regarding your confidence, learning needs and changes in behaviour in relation to suicide reduction.

The workshop is underpinned by Michie (2011) COM-B model for behaviour. The COM-B model suggests that behaviour (B) is made up of 3 components (B): Capability (C), Opportunity (O) and Motivation (M). To perform a particular behaviour, the delegate needs to feel they are able to do so, from both a psychological and physical point (C), they need to have physical and social opportunities to perform the behaviour (O), and they must have the want or need to adopt the new behaviour more than other competing behaviours (M). To facilitate the change each of the components must interact, and interventions need to target one or more of the components to maintain effective behaviour change.

These follow-up evaluations offer key opportunities to evaluate delegates to date but also offer opportunities for further support and guidance as well as identify any enablers and barriers experienced. It is anticipated interviews will last between 45-60 minutes.

Period	5 Mar 2025
Held at	British Army, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National