Creating Hope Together: Scotland's Suicide Prevention Action Plan 2026-2029
The second three year action plan of Creating Hope Together: Scotland’s Suicide Prevention Strategy (2022-2032)
High Level Actions For 2026-29
Introduction
There has been considerable progress since we published our long-term strategy and much has been achieved. This includes the creation of a delivery collective approach known as ‘Suicide Prevention Scotland’, which brings together national and local delivery partners to influence practice and increase supports across many communities in Scotland. This has laid strong foundations for our programme of activity over the next three years to achieve positive impact across all four long-term outcomes set out in the strategy.
How our work has been informed
This action plan is built on wide and varied learning from the work of Suicide Prevention Scotland over the last three years. This includes learning from: academia; those providing support; people with lived and living experience; and the wider communities with whom we work. These voices, alongside data, evidence and wider feedback, have been vital in shaping the development of all our approaches to suicide prevention and recovery support.
Our approach to planning
This action plan provides the direction of travel for this second stage of delivery. We have deliberately set out a more focused set of higher-level actions than we did in the first action plan. This responds to feedback from a range of delivery partners about the importance of retaining flexibility for innovation, which will enable us to adapt our approaches and respond to opportunities as well as challenges over the next three years. This approach will also allow us to build on the significant insights and learning we continue to capture as work progresses.
Our work has a life course approach and, while we have included some actions specifically focused on children and young people across the plan, many of other the other actions will also support children and young people. We will ensure that these are developed and delivered to meet their needs.
Our approach to delivery
Annual delivery plans will be published setting out the detail of work that will be delivered during each year. These will align directly with the high-level actions in this plan and will have the guiding principles woven throughout them.
Whilst the four long-term outcomes of the Creating Hope Together strategy will continue to guide this work, experience over the last three years has told us that we need to be better at working across the outcomes, to ensure our work is fully joined up, that we make the most of our collective resources and so maximise opportunities for collaboration. The outcomes are interconnected and many of the actions contribute to more than one outcome. As such, a key aim of this action plan and subsequent annual delivery plans will be to support greater coherence, alignment and oversight across them.
Throughout this action plan we make reference to people facing inequalities, and marginalised communities who face stigma, discrimination, as well as the socio-economic factors which can contribute to a higher risk of suicide. Through the delivery of the previous action plan, this has meant we have worked with a wide range of organisations and communities for whom this is a reality. This has included (but is not limited to), people who are LGBTQI+, Gypsy/Travellers, minority ethnic communities, women experiencing domestic abuse, those with caring responsibilities, people seeking asylum and refugees, people who are care experienced, people who are experiencing homelessness, people experiencing substance use, people with mental illness, people in the criminal justice system, people experiencing poverty, neurodivergent people, as well as organisations focused on men.
This action plan includes population-level actions. It also includes actions focused on people or groups, settings or occupations where evidence tells us there is an increased risk of suicide. While we do not name specific groups or communities within each action, we will continue to work alongside these communities and the organisations that support them, taking every opportunity to build relationships with others, to ensure we progress our vision of addressing the inequalities which contribute to suicide.