Our Suicide Prevention Services
The Suicide Prevention services in Murrumbidgee are part of the Towards Zero Suicides initiative, which aims to provide leading best practice crisis care and support, build on local community resilience and improve systems and practices to reduce the suicide rate in NSW.
The Suicide Prevention Outreach Team (SPOT) is part of the NSW Health Towards Zero Suicides initiatives being developed across the Murrumbidgee region.
The Suicide Prevention Outreach Team provides community response for people experiencing a suicidal crisis or who may be at risk of suicide. The team is staffed by peer workers with lived experience of suicidal distress alongside clinical staff.
The aim of SPOT is to help people in distress to be supported more quickly, wherever they live in the Murrumbidgee region. SPOT will provide support for people in their community when they need it.
Referrals to SPOT are made through the Mental Health Emergency Consultation Service (MHECS) when people present to an Emergency Department, or one of our Community Mental Health services.
Our two Safe Haven services are warm, welcoming spaces for people experiencing a suicidal crisis. People attending the Safe Havens will receive compassionate care provided by peer workers with a lived experience of suicidality.
There are two Safe Haven locations - one in Wagga Wagga and one in Griffith.
The services are open Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 2.00pm to 9.00pm. You do not need a referral to attend.
- Read more about the Griffith Safe Haven
- Read more about the Wagga Safe Haven
As part of the Towards Zero Suicides Premier’s Priority, Murrumbidgee MHDA (along with all other NSW Local Health Districts) has received funding from NSW Health to improve the way public Mental Health services respond to people experiencing suicidal thoughts.
There are a number of changes being made across the Murrumbidgee District to improve the care that is provided to people experiencing suicidal distress or crisis.
We have recently introduced a Suicide Prevention Pathway to ensure that every person that attends our service is able to receive high quality evidence based treatment responses.
In practice this means that if you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, your key clinician from Community Mental Health, or a staff member of the inpatient unit may work with you using the CAMS-care framework.
The Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality, known as CAMS-care is a ‘philosophy of care’ that can help people experiencing suicidal thoughts by identifying and targeting the problems that drive them to consider ending their life.
The CAMS-care approach treats people at risk of suicide with:
- Empathy
- Collaboration
- Honesty
- Focusing on what makes a person suicidal
Your clinician will work with you to create a safety plan and connect you to resources that will help you get through difficult moments.
Listening to the community
Hearing the views and ideas of people with lived experience of distress and suicidal thoughts, as well as members of the broader community, is an important part of making sure that our suicide prevention services and initiatives meet the needs of the community, carers and people experiencing suicidal crisis.
We are involving people with this experience in the design and development of the services in a number of ways.
Click through the tabs below to see how we have worked with the community and how you can get involved.
Get involved
To help people accessing Community Mental Health services understand more about CAMS-Care and how it may help them, we are developing an information sheet.
We want to make sure that the information is easy to understand and is helpful to people with lived experience of suicidality
Thank you to those who took time to share their thoughts. We will post here with an update on the postcard based on the feedback received in early 2023.
Previous consultations
Since October 2020 we have involved people with lived and caring experience of suicidality in the development of our suicide prevention services. See below for a summary of these consultations.
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Timeline item 1 - complete
November 2020 - Co-design sessions
Workshops were held with people with lived experience and health professionals to design the SPOT and Safe Haven initiatives.
The input received from these workshops helped inform the design of the services and contributed to the Model of Care.
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Timeline item 2 - complete
May 2021 - Community consultation - SPOT
We invited the community to share their experiences, ideas and feedback to help design the SPOT initiative service model.
Read our news update for a summary of what we heard.
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Timeline item 3 - complete
July 2021 - Suicide Prevention services Model of Care
We invited community feedback on the draft Model of Care for SPOT and Safe Haven. This document guides the function of these services and the way they support people accessing them.
Read our news update for information on what we hear from the community.
The Model of Care continues to develop as the services are evaluated.
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Timeline item 4 - complete
September 2021 - SPOT and Safe Haven promotional materials
To help us make sure that the community are getting the information they need about the Safe Haven services, we created leaflets and postcards about the SPOT and Safe Haven services.
The community were invited to provide feedback on these materials which were updated based on what you told us.
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Timeline item 5 - complete
April - June 2022 - Evaluation of co-design
People with lived and caring experience, staff members and people who have accessed the SPOT and Safe Haven services were involved in workshops and surveys to evaluate the co-design process and how this has helped develop the services.
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Timeline item 6 - active
October 2022 - CAMS-Care resource review
We are currently seeking feedback on an information postcard which lets people accessing Community Mental Health services know about the CAMS-Care framework.
See the 'Get Involved' tab for more information on how to take part.
