The Suicide Prevention Consortium (SPC) started with a clear goal: to make sure those most affected by suicide were central to national policy.
As the project concludes, we can assess what has changed and what still needs improvement. The SPC, part of the Government’s VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance, was based on a simple idea: those with lived experience should help shape what suicide prevention looks like.
Find out more about the Consortium
What was the Suicide Prevention Consortium?
The SPC originally united four organisations to do something rare: use the experiences of people directly affected by suicide to shape national policy and research. This included researching and writing reports, showing that real expertise comes from lived experience, and could help drive change.
The Department for Health and Social Care’s VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance funded the Consortium to help voluntary and community groups influence health policy.
Who was involved?
The three partners were Samaritans, the National Suicide Prevention Alliance (NSPA), and the Support After Suicide Partnership (SASP). WithYou was also involved for the first four years of the project.
What did involving people with lived experience actually mean?
It meant it was more than just asking people to share their stories. From the beginning, people who had survived a suicidal crisis or lost someone to suicide helped shape the Consortium’s work. They contributed to policy, set research priorities, and ensured the real human experiences were not forgotten.
What did the Suicide Prevention Consortium discover?
Across the research with people with lived experience we/SPC did, many people said they reached out for help but were let down because the system was not designed to support them. The same issues kept coming up, with people:
- Being turned away when they asked for help — for example, told to ring a different number, come back another time, or that they didn’t meet the threshold for support
- Being passed between services in a way that felt less like being helped and more like being passed on
- Encountering professionals such as GPs, A&E staff, police and teachers who wanted to help but were not always equipped to do so
- Finding that what helped most — community, connection and relationships — was often not funded
- Experiencing isolation, both as a feeling and as something services were not set up to address
- Facing unequal access to support, with marginalised groups encountering additional barriers (as highlighted in the Consortium’s research on alcohol, LGBTQ+ communities, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities)
- Not being in the room when decisions were made about the services they depended on
What needs to happen next
The Consortium's work points to some concrete changes, things that services, commissioners, and government can act on:
No one should be turned away. Every contact point, whether it’s a GP surgery, A&E, or a helpline, should offer real, tangible support, not just send people elsewhere until they give up.
Frontline workers need proper training. GPs, police, teachers, housing workers, and anyone who might encounter someone in crisis should have access to consistent, quality suicide prevention training.
Services need to join up, and people shouldn’t be lost within the system. Being referred should feel like being accompanied, not abandoned. The gap between services is where people fall through the cracks.
Communities need to be funded as part of prevention. A peer support group, a trusted local organisation, a community space where someone is known by name, these are not soft add-ons. For many people, they are what keeps them alive.
Health inequalities have to be taken seriously. Not everyone is at equal risk, and not everyone can access equal support. Suicide prevention strategy needs to reflect that honestly.
Lived experience should shape decisions from the start, not at the end. Co-production isn't a tick-box. When people with direct experience are involved in designing services, those services work better. That evidence exists, but it needs to be acted on.
The Suicide Prevention Consortium is ending, but the issues it surfaced haven't gone anywhere. The conversations that took place, the evidence gathered, the relationships between organisations and between people who have been through the hardest of times — all of that continues.
Suicide prevention isn't only for specialists.
It lives in communities, in everyday relationships, whether someone notices that a colleague has gone quiet or a neighbour hasn't been seen in a while. Asking "Are you OK?", listening to the answer, and being there to understand are all things we can do.