Carrie Montgomery is deputy chief executive at Contact NI. If 90% of Northern Ireland patient deaths by suicide were assessed as no or low risk during their last contact with services, she asks in this post why the Public Health Agency is being constrained to just provide services for people at high risk of suicide?
Contact NI’s annual suicide prevention conference will be held on Thursday in Belfast. In a Northern Ireland where government departments and bodies often seem more keen on obfuscation and face-saving than data-sharing and truth-telling, switching from suicide reduction to a zero suicide approach that requires honest sharing and learning seems a large step. But a very worthwhile one in a place which continues to lose lives with the long-lasting ripples of the conflict.
