Practice Hope

GP practices that sign up to practice hope recieve:

• Suicide prevention training
• 60 minute clinical staff training
• 90 minute non-clinical staff training

Practice hope offers training for primary care staff on 10 - 25 year olds who are thinking of suicide or self-harm

Practice hope offers training for CCGs, PCNs and practices on how to improve their service to better support children and young people, based on the NHS PACE setter model.

The training includes:

• Improving services in primary care
• Recognise signs of suicidality
• Understand reasons behind thoughts of suicide
• Engaging a person in crisis empathically
• Offer emotional support
• Recognise potential barriers to seeking help
• Signpost to appropriate resources (help lines)

For more information about the Practice Hope training, visit Ollys Future website.

The Practise Hope pilot ran from February 2019 to September 2020 and received £200,000 funding from Health Education England. It was delivered by practices in the Dartford area in Kent, in Brighton and Hove, Sussex and the Woking area of Surrey. It was a collaboration between Health Education England, Sussex Partnership NHS Trust, Mind and Olly’s Future.

Findings from this pilot showed that:

• Some GPs did not feel equipped or confident to support children and young people who self-harm or have thoughts of suicide.
• Young people did not know they could go to their local surgery for help with mental health issues.

The next phase  will be to embed the initiative in other areas of the country through providing training, as above, to surgeries on how to run the Practise Hope themselves, providing them with all the surveys, action plans, focus group learning and materials. 

This training was funded by Health Education England.

This course is facilitated by Mind in local communities who support the delivery of the training and follow up support.