Suicide prevention and surveillance

Suicide prevention

Suicide and self-harm remain significant public health issues in Wales, requiring a coordinated, evidence‑based approach across health, social care and wider partners. National work in this area focuses on prevention, early identification, timely support, and learning from data and lived experience to reduce risk and improve outcomes for individuals, families and communities.

Further information about national priorities, programmes of work and system improvement activity is available on the NHS Wales Performance and Improvement website.

Suicide surveillance

The Real Time Suspected Suicide Surveillance (RTSSS) for Wales was established in Public Health Wales on the 1st April 2022.

One of the ambitions in the ‘Talk to me 2’ suicide and self-harm prevention strategy for Wales (2015-2022) was to establish surveillance systems to improve the quality of data and intelligence to inform prevention. One of these systems relates to the real-time capture of suspected suicide data, via Police-based data capture methods.

About the programme

Real Time Suspected Suicide Surveillance (RTSSS) is a population level surveillance system which has been developed through partnership working and collaboration between mental health and vulnerable groups policy leads in Welsh Government; the Police Liaison Unit based in Welsh Government; the four Welsh Police forces; the national suicide and self-harm prevention programme based in the NHS Wales Executive; Swansea University, and the Public Health Wales Data, Knowledge and Research directorate who are acting as the national custodians of the suspected suicide data.  The programme was set up using systems already established by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) and British Transport Police. 

Intelligence around numbers, rates, and trends in suicide deaths in Wales has been available since 1981 and continues to be available through annual reports, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS data relates to registered coroner confirmed deaths by suicide following inquests in each year, whereas RTSSS data relates to deaths by suspected suicide.

The RTSSS is still in its early stages of implementation, with early challenges relating to timely data capture, transfer, cleansing, interpretation, and reporting.

The RTSSS collects information on people who die by suspected suicide in Wales, and people who are Welsh residents who die by suspected suicide outside of Wales.  This is so we can monitor deaths by suspected suicide and build up a picture of patterns and trends of deaths, in order to better focus suicide prevention efforts.   

The information that is collected includes personally identifiable information i.e. name, address, date of birth, of the person who has died, and information about their circumstances.  The reason we need identifiable information is to link to other sources of information to improve the quality of the information. 

Information is sent to Public Health Wales by the four Welsh Police forces.  We may also receive information from the National Collaborative Commissioning Unit, critical care units, prisons, surveillance systems in other countries, and the media.  We may then gather further information from health services, prisons and coroners.  We check our information against other systems where information is collected: The Child Death Review Programme, the NHS Wales Delivery Unit and the British Transport Police.  The information is entered onto a secure database which is accessible only by members of the RTSSS team. 

The legal basis for the activities of the RTSSS are:  

• Paragraph 3(b) of the Public Health Wales NHS Trust (Establishment) Order 2009 “to develop and maintain arrangements for making information about matters related to the protection and improvement of health in Wales available to the public in Wales; to undertake and commission research into such matters and to contribute to the provision and development of training in such matters” 
• Paragraph 3(c) of the Public Health Wales NHS Trust (Establishment) Order 2009 which states as one of its functions: ‘to undertake the systematic collection, analysis and dissemination of information about the health of the people of Wales in particular including cancer incidence, mortality and survival; and prevalence of congenital anomalies. 
• Under the common law duty of confidentiality, the processing of personal data in the RTSSS is considered by Public Health Wales to in the overriding public interest. 
• Section 251 approval (NHS Act 2006) for the processing of confidential patient information without consent.

Aims and Objectives

The aim of the RTSSS is to act as a central national repository for suspected suicides in Wales and to generate the intelligence to inform suicide prevention activity across Wales. It will also be used for ongoing monitoring of the impact of the pandemic on suspected suicide deaths.

The objectives of the programme are to: 

• ascertain and collate data on suspected suicide deaths in Wales and suspected suicide deaths of people who are normally resident in Wales (who may die elsewhere) 
• undertake surveillance of suspected suicides including the identification of and description of emerging suicide clusters to inform local response groups 
• undertake surveillance of suspected suicides to identify patterns and trends of suspected suicide deaths to inform policy and practice 
• share the findings through accessible data visualisation, to inform action by different groups and forums 
• contribute to the suicide prevention agenda 
• contribute to research into suicide prevention 

Further information about suicide prevention and sources of support

• Public Health Network Cymru – Suicide and Self-harm Prevention 
• Suicide and Self-harm Prevention – NHS Wales Executive
• SSHP Cymru – Training Hub
• SSHP Cymru – Help is at Hand
• Mental Health Support

Contact us

If you require any further information, please contact the Real Time Suspected Suicide Surveillance team.