Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies on NHS services provision of the findings in the article entitled, Mental health services, suicide and 7-day working, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in July 2016, related to suicides at weekends.

The cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy (2012) identifies people under the care of mental health services as a high risk group. We have made significant progress in this area over the last decade with the number of inpatient deaths by suicide reducing by more than half. However, we recognise that the number of suicides in people under the care of mental health services in the community has been increasing.

We have implemented the Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat and now every local area has a crisis care action plan in place. We are also investing an additional £1 billion in mental health over the next five years which includes £290 million to improve perinatal mental health, £247 million to improve liaison mental health services in emergency departments and over £400 million to enable 24/7 treatment in communities as a safe and effective alternative to hospital.

We have accepted the recommendations of the independent Mental Health Taskforce’s Five Year Forward View for Mental Health to reduce the national suicide rate by 10% by 2020/21, local areas to implement multi-agency suicide prevention action plans by 2017 and to take steps so that lessons are learned from all suicides in NHS-funded mental health settings to prevent future deaths.

We will publish the annual progress report to the cross-Government strategy later this year which will set out ways we are strengthening the strategy, including how we can reduce suicides in high risk groups.