United with the frontline

That’s why we called 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 took 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 achieved national news coverage, and alerted our communities to the issue by getting editors’ letters published across England in regional news.

Emergency responders 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 backed the campaign and used their influence to push us closer to getting this life-saving training in place. And it worked.

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 were 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. 

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.

We also asked people 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. When it transpired that Police Officers were being offered this training, we felt it was only right that firefighters receive it too.

We were delighted to hand this letter over to the Minister at our branch in Chester on Friday 19 June 2026 alongside Samaritans' volunteers and Jim from Manchester Fire and Rescue Service.

We then returned to Parliament the following week to urge MPs to contact the Minister for Fire, urging her to ensure that suicide prevention training is part of the new College of Fire and Rescue. We had around 30 MPs join us throughout the afternoon to hear more about our campaign.

We are pleased to hear that the Ambulance Staff Charity are piloting work in suicide prevention in their sector and there are discussions about a feasibility study that includes training across the sector.

Whilst this campaign is no longer active, we are still campaigning hard to ensure that fewer people in the UK die by suicide. You can sign up as a Samaritans campaigner below and help take action that could save lives.