Suicide

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:36 pm on 7 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:36, 7 January 2020

I thank the Member for that. I've had an opportunity already to read the review, to read her own foreword to it, and the foreword by the Children's Commissioner for Wales, and to look at its recommendations. And of course Lynne Neagle is right, Llywydd, that a death by suicide leaves a ripple of effects that reaches out into the lives of people who are left, not simply in the immediate family, but in friends and other organisations who will have known that child or that young person.

Amongst the recommendations of the report, I think a really important one is that the 33 young people whose cases are reviewed in the report, a third of them were known to mental health services. And yet, many more of them were known to other public services, who may not have had suicide and suicide prevention at the front of their minds when they were working with that young person—whether that's in youth custody, where we know that there has been a really alarming rise in suicide in custodial settings; whether that's contact with the police; whether it's young people who are known to social services in different ways. So, of course the Government will be committed to absorbing the recommendations of the report, right across the Government. Because it is not a matter for the health Minister, although Public Health Wales was part of the production of the report; it is a report for the whole of the Government, looking to see that, wherever vulnerable young people are in touch with public services—devolved and non-devolved—the signs that may be there, the causes that may be identifiable, are recognised and acted upon, in line with the recommendations of the report.