North/South Ministerial Council: Health and Food Safety

Part of Ministerial Statements – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 4:00 pm on 13 December 2021.

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Photo of Robin Swann Robin Swann UUP 4:00, 13 December 2021

I thank the Member for again raising the issue. It is a challenge for both jurisdictions, no matter what side of the border that you live on, to work towards addressing the critical issues, and not just suicide prevention but mental health and well-being. We continue to monitor closely the impacts of COVID on a range of mental health and suicide prevention indicators. We continue to see an increasing number of mental health presentations and increased levels of patient acuity for mental health. Suicide prevention continues to be a key priority in both jurisdictions. For example, my Department has its Protect Life 2 suicide prevention strategy. While that is being implemented, new structures have been established to drive progress, and those include the Executive's working group on mental well-being, resilience and suicide prevention.

It is the North/South work on the self-harm registry, however, that has been instrumental in our being able to monitor self-harm figures during this crucial period. Work is developing on exploration of the variance between prevalence and influencing factors in Northern Ireland and the South of Ireland. A paper that described presentations to hospitals as a result of self-harm or ideation and that examined patterns of repetition was published by the 'General Hospital Psychiatry' journal in October 2019. Cross-border collaboration on data registration officer training events will also cover areas of self-care, data protection and case definitions and will be facilitated by both the PHA and the National Suicide Research Foundation (NSRF) annually. Meetings are under way on funding calls by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) North/South research programme. Consideration is being given to the application for a North/South excellence hub on the identification and prevention of self-harm and suicide research and on the dissemination of evidence to inform practice and policymaking.