National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group Annual Report 2023/2024

Foreword

This is the first annual report of Scotland’s new National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group (NSPAG), established in June 2023 to provide independent and impartial advice to the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) as the joint owners of Scotland’s Suicide Prevention Strategy 2022-2032: Creating Hope Together, and to those directly involved in its implementation.

As members of the NSPAG we each bring our own different experiences, knowledge, skills and professional backgrounds to our role and have found not only that our diverse views have helped to enrich our advice, but also that we have been able to promote suicide prevention more broadly in the range of our professional networks across Scotland’s society.

Against the background of our personal and professional diversity what we share is willingness to learn from those with their own lived and living experience of the impacts of suicide, from suicide prevention practitioners and from those with academic insights. We have been humbled by the generosity and passion of those who work tirelessly to save lives and prevent the tragic consequences that each suicide brings for families, friends, colleagues and communities.

Scotland’s Suicide Prevention Strategy 2022-2032 is rightly ambitious in its vision to reduce the number of suicide deaths in Scotland whilst tackling the inequalities which contribute to suicide. The persistent impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, the continuing cost of living crisis and the inequalities these pressures compound add urgency and many challenges to realising that vision.

Our Annual Report 2023/24 sets out the context against which implementation of the strategy has begun and our views on its progress this last year. We commend the progress made in establishing a framework for delivering the strategy and its vision, and the collaborative and inclusive leadership culture at its heart. We also welcome plans to undertake measurable action over the coming year in specific areas of implementation and set out our intention to report specifically on those in our next annual report.

In this, our first annual report, we make three specific recommendations focussed on tackling inequalities, improving child and adolescent mental health services and on the costing and resourcing of the strategy’s implementation plans. We advise the Scottish Government and COSLA that the timely and effective implementation of these recommendations will be critical to delivering their vision for suicide prevention in Scotland.

Together with the advice and access to professional and policy networks which we have provided throughout this year, we make these recommendations as part of our contribution to the critically important mission of saving lives from the preventable tragedy of suicide. As individuals and in working together as the NSPAG, it has been our privilege during 2023/24 to play our part alongside all those individuals who – personally and professionally - make up the deeply committed and impressive suicide prevention community in Scotland.

Rose Fitzpatrick CBE QPM

Chair

National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group

August 2024