United with the frontline

That’s why we’re calling on the Government to make sure all emergency service workers have the suicide prevention training they need, as well as the time and resources to learn - and put what they’ve learned into action - to help save lives.

Hundreds of us have taken action together; inviting our local MPs to events with frontline workers, and sharing emergency services’ suicide-related call out figures with our newspapers and politicians. We’ve achieved national news coverage, and alerted our communities to the issue by getting editors’ letters published across England in regional news. This is huge!

Emergency responders have joined Samaritans staff to meet MPs, who also joined us at Party Conferences. And thanks to all of us acting together – a swathe of MPs have backed the campaign and used their influence to push us closer to getting this life-saving training in place. And it’s working:

• We’ve secured a police training commitment:

The Government has announced that new police recruits and supervisors will receive protected time for suicide prevention training as part of the new Policing White Paper. You can read more about this win in our blog piece.

We’ve also been invited to two ministerial roundtables at the Home Office, one on suicide prevention, the other on officer wellbeing - which feed into this work. This means we have a seat at the table with the right people in Government who make decisions about policing. 

• And we’ve made important progress with the fire service:

Thanks to all of our efforts, the National Fire Chiefs Council has now:

- Included a link to the United with the Frontline campaign in its national staff toolkit

- Connected us with their safeguarding lead to discuss how firefighters respond to suicide-related incidents.

These are huge strides forward! But we won’t stop here.

• Make suicide prevention training across all emergency services mandatory.
  
• Take action to make sure that frontline services are properly resourced, and staff supported, so that workers can attend training and put into action what they’ve learnt, to help save lives that could be lost to suicide.

Now is the time to build on this momentum. Government must introduce the same training and workplace wellbeing they announced for police officers, for firefighters too. That’s why we need you to sign this Open Letter to the Fire Minister.

Suicide-related callouts to Fire and Rescue Services have tripled in the last decade. However, firefighters often don’t have the adequate training or wellbeing support to deal with these sorts of incidents. Now that Police Officers are being offered this training, it is only right that firefighters receive it too. Will you add your name to show the Government how much this is needed?

Sign the Open Letter here.