Creating Hope Together: Scotland's Suicide Prevention Action Plan 2026-2029

How We Will Work

Through Suicide Prevention Scotland – our partnership delivery model – we have created a strengthened Scotland-wide suicide prevention community that recognises the role we can all play in suicide prevention, bringing together key national, local and sector partners alongside our valued Lived and Living Experience Panels and Academic Advisory Group. Through this community we are harnessing our collective resources, insights and leadership to make the biggest difference possible in preventing suicide.

As we continue to deliver our programme of actions through Suicide Prevention Scotland we will review and refine our approaches to ensure our work is effective in driving meaningful change.

Crucially, we will ensure that the way our delivery mechanism is set up and how it works in practice enables partners to work flexibly across outcomes so that our activity can have maximum impact. It is also recognised that this action plan will require collaborative work and action across and beyond Suicide Prevention Scotland, to ensure that everyone is equipped to play their part in supporting the delivery of this action plan and able to maximise their contribution to suicide prevention.

As we deliver this action plan, we will:

• draw on the expertise of our National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group (NSPAG), which brings together leaders in a range of sectors and communities, in which we want to deepen our understanding of suicide risk and interventions in order to improve our responses to those sectors and communities. NSPAG’s insights will be particularly helpful in informing the whole of government and society approach to suicide prevention during the lifetime of this action plan
• work closely with the Academic Advisory Group, the Lived and Living Experience Panel and Youth Advisory Group. We will also engage with practitioners including local suicide prevention implementation leads, and organisations working with groups and communities at higher risk of suicide
• continue to take an outcome-focused approach to our work recognising the importance of measuring the impact the work is having, and not just the delivery of the actions. The Outcomes Framework which we published to support our long-term strategy has provided a theory of change which helps to demonstrate the contribution the actions have to achieving the outcomes
• continue to work closely with a wide range of policies and strategies across national and local government that impact on the life circumstances that can increase the risk of suicide, recognising that our suicide prevention action plan sits in a broader context
• adopt an approach that recognises the flexibility required to meet local need. This will require continued active and ongoing engagement and collaboration with policy makers and delivery partners

Evaluation

We will continue to monitor and evaluate the delivery of this action plan to review whether our work is having the intended impact.

We have worked to fully embed OutNav, an online tool which is used to capture the evidence to help demonstrate the contribution the activity is making to the outcomes. This approach is enabling robust monitoring and evaluation of the work across outcome pathways. This is clearly demonstrated in the annual reports published by Suicide Prevention Scotland.

This involves capturing a wide range of qualitative and quantitative evidence sources and linking them to a series of ‘theory of change pathways’. This in turn demonstrates how the activities delivered by Suicide Prevention Scotland are contributing to the Creating Hope Together strategy’s strategic outcomes. As highlighted, the evidence gathered from this evaluation will continue to form the basis of Suicide Prevention Scotland’s annual reports and will continue to build up over the course of the strategy, allowing for robust (and ongoing) evaluation and learning as the work progresses throughout the lifetime of the strategy.

This information is critical to understanding if our work is having the intended effects in making progress towards the four long-term outcomes in our strategy, achieving our vision and aim, and informing future priorities.

The evaluation approach is supporting a process of continual learning and improvement through:

• providing a structured way for Delivery Collective members to reflect on progress within each action and identify opportunities for improvement
• providing the Strategic Outcome Leads with timely information about how the work across the actions is progressing as a whole, where there are areas of good progress or emerging obstacles to delivery
• providing a cross programme view of progress, challenges and opportunities for improvement

Bringing people together at regular intervals has been really helpful in identifying cross-cutting learning and opportunities for improvement.

We will continue to monitor and evaluate the delivery of this action plan to review whether our work is having the intended impact.

Resourcing

A great deal has already been achieved through the dedicated suicide prevention budget which doubled over the course of the first Action Plan to £2.8 million per annum. As well as at least maintaining that, we will continue to build suicide prevention into broader funding programmes and priorities, seeking to maximise the suicide prevention benefits of national and local government budgets.

Governance

To deliver this plan we will build on and seek to strengthen links between our existing delivery and advisory arrangements and new governance structures established since the strategy and action plan were published in 2022, notably the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy Leadership Board.

We will continue to work closely with the NSPAG to support delivery and address any barriers to progress. NSPAG will continue to offer advice and guidance to the Scottish Government and COSLA on progress on the strategy and any changes needed to direction/priorities, including through its annual progress report/s.