A spate of suicides in the Welsh town of Bridgend prompted local
services to work together to pre-empt a repeat. Andrew
Mickel reports on the strategy and the lessons learned
For all of the acres of newspaper coverage and hours of TV
output on the spate of suicides in Bridgend County, what we
actually know about what happened is sparse.
From what little research has been done into suicide clusters -
and it isn't yet certain that what happened in Wales can even be
classed as a cluster - there are few concrete conclusions about how
response has to be put in place to stop more deaths from
happening.
"Clusters of suicides are not entirely uncommon but the cluster
at Bridgend was unique, particularly with the media," says Phill
Chick, mental health director for the Welsh Assembly government at
the time of the spate. "What the services had to cope with at the
time was very unusual."
The series of events put the local authorities in the difficult
position of trying to build a response to something of which they
had no experience.
By January 2008, the number of apparent suicides over the
previous year stood at 13 and the world's media were starting to
draw links between some of the deaths.
What the authorities did have at their disposal, however, was
strong community engagement with which to identify the young people
who needed support and respond to their needs.
Finding those young people entailed going well beyond those
already in touch with mental health services and using the eyes and
ears of statutory services, the voluntary sector and the
public.
Engaging local
people
Although the area's services were already trying to engage with
local people to tackle the issue, at the start of 2008 the area's
local service board - similar to an English local strategic
partnership board - created a suicide management group to help
co-ordinate effective multi-agency action.
"One fact I've often quoted is that 73% of people who commit
suicide haven't been in touch with mental health specialist
services a year before their death," says Chick.
"The success of the local service board as a place for bringing
together services was that it brought together health, social care
and community groups to provide a platform for a very broad
community response."
"We made sure we were capturing everybody," says Bridgend chief
executive Jo Farrar, who chairs the local service board.
"Young people might come through health or the police, and the
public too were worried and reporting more vulnerable young people
until we had 300 people identified. From there we strengthened
services such as the youth offending and after-care teams; we
helped people in the community. We were able to provide more
support for young people and help them more effectively."
Services exist
For many young people, there were already many services
available whose existence just needed flagging.
The youth counselling service was given extra resources, as were
two counselling services in the voluntary sector. There are at
least a dozen youth centres available with qualified youth workers
on the staff.
The board's efforts were bolstered by the Bridgend street
pastors who worked hard to make contact with young people.
"They are brilliant in Bridgend anyway and they set up a Solid
Rock café and the young people love it," Farrar says. Now lottery
money is targeted at the local voluntary sector.
For the list of 300 people identified as being more vulnerable,
a sub-group of the suicide management group worked together to
tailor services individually.
As well as planning when they needed support - often around key
birthdays and anniversaries - on-going services were funded.
The local child and adolescent mental health service relaxed its
age criteria to ensure all vulnerable young people were seen by the
service, while an additional nurse and doctor were recruited. Adult
mental health services were bolstered with weekend and evening
drop-in clinics.
Identifying
risks
On top of all this, a lottery-funded £1m Let's Talk initiative
has been set up, including two Asist (Applied Suicide Intervention
Skills Training) co-ordinators to help train people to identify
those at risk of suicide in the community.
Another lesson learned from Bridgend, however, is that having
services alone is not enough: people have to feel like they have
ownership of services.
"We had an occasion where a small community suffered a series of
tragedies and we were considering how to put a response in," says
Chief Supt Tim Jones, who was divisional commander of Bridgend
police at the time.
"They said, don't just bring youth outreach workers to young
people on the streets, come to the youth club on a Tuesday at
7.30pm. And it worked. We did that successfully and, after we'd
moulded a response in the community, it helped us to create a
template to engage."
Out-of-hours
services
With health and social services providing more out-of-hours
services, the work did not come cheap.
A small grant from the Welsh government helped, but the
principle of out-of-hours payments needs greater clarity, according
to a review of the suicides response.
"We had to do it on top of the day job so we had to move our
resources around," says Farrar.
"We tried to free up people - the council [including children's
services], police, health [including mental health services],
police, the voluntary sector. It was difficult because we also had
business as usual."
The emergency response in Bridgend has now been integrated into
ordinary services, and is responsible for the 300 vulnerable people
on the operations sub-group list passed back to the agencies. But
the group would be started up again should a pattern of suicides
re-occur.
Making effective support networks a normal reality is now a
priority. Farrar flags up as a good piece of work a project by some
GCSE students involving the use of social networks to help support
young people.
The Welsh government has also unveiled a consultation on a
national suicide strategy, in part informed by what happened in
Bridgend. In the county itself, the number of suicides fell from
August 2008 to more typical levels. The challenge now is to make
sure it stays that way.
Rapid response
● Quickly put a multi-agency structure into place with clear
leadership and clear responsibilities for all parties.
● Identify the most vulnerable people in order to focus
resources where they are most needed, and prevent small problems
growing larger by supporting lower-level need.
● Liaise with community leaders to ensure the response makes the
most of resources.
● Involve all groups that have contact with a client group, and
make sure all professionals know what other services are
available.
The Bridgend case
The apparent cluster of suicides in Bridgend County started in
January 2007, but first came to national attention after being
linked together in the media in January 2008.
Although the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University
has suggested that irresponsible media coverage can lead to further
deaths, it was variously claimed in the press that everything from
social networking sites to phone masts could be responsible.
Coverage of the town, meanwhile, painted Bridgend as an area
with high unemployment and long-term sick levels, and daubed the
town as the suicide capital of Britain, despite the fact most
deaths took place in the wider county.
This article is published in the 23 July issue of
Community Care magazine under the heading Suicide
Watch