PROTECT: Suicide prevention for university student support

It is estimated that one in four university students will experience mental illness and students are increasingly speaking to student support services and faculty members about their mental health concerns. This one-day, advanced training for student support staff examines new ways of looking at patient collaboration, assessing risk and safety planning to help you better manage suicidal patients.

The recent increase in suicides amongst university students has brought the duty of care faced by universities into focus and many institutions are seeking to make positive changes towards providing holistic care to their students. For student support services, suicide prevention has increasingly become a focus of care and a source of anxiety for staff.

Traditional ways of assessing and categorising risk have little actual value in predicting or preventing suicide, and decision-making around risk is prone to unconscious bias that means seemingly rational choices do not always represent optimal care for the people under our care.

Developed and delivered in collaboration with PROTECT, the course takes a research-driven, relational approach to suicide prevention, critically examining the process of assessing risk and introducing a range of practical frameworks to formulate your risk assessments, make collaborative decisions with students in difficulty, and effectively safety plan.

Starting with the premise that the most powerful tool we have for preventing risk is the therapeutic relationship, the PROTECT suicide prevention training will enable you to apply your existing relational skills more systematically to improve your confidence and ability in managing students at risk of suicide.

If you are interested in commissioning this course for your university please get in contact with jose.mascarenhas@slam.nhs.uk – head of sales.