PHA pledges funding for new pilot scheme to help people in crisis
The Public Health Agency is providing almost £500,000 additional funding for mental health promotion and suicide prevention services in Belfast.
The organisation is splitting the investment between the community and voluntary sector, as well as a new pilot triage scheme to help respond to people in crisis.
£300,000 will go towards organisations on the ground while £100,000 will be directed into the 'Street Triage' initiative.
Seamus Mullen is the Public Health Agency's head of Health and Social Wellbeing Improvement in the Belfast and South Eastern area.
He told DT Cool FM a little about the new programme:
"The main aim of that programme is to deal with people appropriately.
"Quite often if someone's in crisis, the default position is to bring them to an accident and emergency room and that's often not the right place for them.
"So the rationale for this scheme is to provide a team that can respond to people in terms of social and emotional crisis and help deescalate them within the context of a conversation," he said.
The scheme is the first of its kind in Northern Ireland.
Seamus says it has been successful in England and Scotland and could be rolled out across the rest of Northern Ireland:
"It's not a type of scheme that's been run here in Northern Ireland before.
"We know its successful in some of the counties across in England and Scotland.
"For example in Nottingham over the last three years they've been able to successfully divert almost 60% of clients away from Emergency Departments that have engaged with the programme.
"We're hopeful that the scheme will be successful and if it is successful we'll look at whether or not we roll it out on a regional basis."
Community and voluntary groups will benefit from extra training, counselling and therapy sessions in an attempt to alleviate pressures on services struggling to cope with the high demand.
The Public Health Agency are placing particular focus on disadvantaged areas.
Seamus says the suicide risk is much higher in those parts:
"The evidence shows that in the 20% most deprived areas, the suicide rate is three times higher than what we would generally see in the more affluent areas.
"It's a very complex picture, the root causes for those high rates of suicide can be anything in and around deprivation, social economic issues, family issues, relationship issues, there's a very complex picture that tells a story behind that," he said.
The new services are set to be rolled out in 2018.