Is your organisation and its staff team ready to respond professionally to an emergency situation caused by suicide or an attempted suicide?

This is a case-study and self-evaluation tool for senior leaders: preparing your organisation and your people to respond effectively and keep everyone safe.

In response to a project Dynamis carried out last year with unique requirements involving crisis intervention and incident management, we recruited a former Team Leader to help us with issues around interventions in school contexts.

This experienced professional told us the story of one attempted suicide she and her team responded to at a UK boarding school one dark and rainy night only a few years ago.  

The narrative which follows, and its associated checklist questions, are offered to be provocative for your team in generating policies and procedures, seeking appropriate training for your team and overall, keeping everyone safe in your school. 

Here is our Team Leader’s story.  Names have been changed to protect those involved.

“As Team Leader, I led a school’s boarding team for five years.  I was responsible to the Head for the care and support of around eighty girls and young women aged between 11 and 18 years old, and the leadership of the staff team who looked after them.  

In five years, my team and I managed four attempted suicides. 

One was a ‘stand-alone’ event, but the other three were clustered together, occurring within a six-week window.  This story looks at the first of that cluster of three.  It poses questions to senior leaders of schools (or comparable organisations) to support them in preparing for a suicide attempt and planning effective responses.

Our staff team was small.  I was on duty on five out of seven evenings.  When I was off, my deputy assumed overall responsibility for operations.  Two additional boarding staff on duty were supported by three young ‘Gap’ volunteers.  We all carried radios throughout our shifts - it was the easiest way to communicate in real-time across a sprawling school campus and large boarding houses.

We did not have a process in our Staff handbook or our Critical Incident Handbook about what to do in the event of an attempted suicide.  There had been some learning following this first incident, but for a variety of reasons we hadn't formalised that learning into policy and procedures that the team could use.  

Having a pre-planned and practiced response, ensuring that your team understand and can execute it - even if it is imperfect - is the most important thing I learned from what unfolded that night.”

Questions for Senior Leadership:

If the worst was to happen, how well do you think your organisation would score *right now*, on a scale of 1-10, in managing a suicide or an attempted suicide?  Why that score?

Does your organisation have a risk-assessment and known policies and procedures for suicide/attempted suicide?  Are you and the team familiar with them?  Where would you find these, where are they kept?  Who has responsibility for them and how are they reviewed?  Are they supported by training for key staff ‘on the ground’?  

What form does existing training take and how regularly is it undertaken?  How does training and practice of staff influence the review of policy and procedures?  What improvements does the organisation need to make to affect positive change that will ultimately help keep people safe?

If your organisation doesn’t have policies or procedures in place, what does leadership need to bear in mind as they make plans to address this?  Who will need to be involved in their formation and subsequent training and implementation?  What specialist support might be required?

“Experience is something you get, 3 minutes after you needed it”

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