Mental wellbeing, suicide prevention and community engagement

Making the case for action

Mental health is now recognised as being incredibly important to growth, development, learning and resilience. Mental wellbeing helps to protect the body from the impact of life’s stresses and traumatic events. This leads to healthier lifestyles and improved management of long-term illness.

Promoting mental wellbeing and preventing mental health problems is a key element of national strategies because mental health influences all other health outcomes. Increasing mental wellbeing and available services for mental health is integral to reducing the number of people taking their own lives.

Delivering the overall reduction in the number of people taking their own lives will in part be driven by the range of objectives set out across the NHS Long Term Plan. These objectives seek to improve access to services so that people receive support earlier, receive good-quality care and move towards sustained recovery as quickly as possible. Importantly, the shift towards more integrated, population-level health systems will support more localised and personalised responses to health inequalities in prevention and treatment.

Community engagement approaches help reduce local inequalities and ensure that health and wellbeing initiatives are effective. Involving local communities, particularly disadvantaged groups, is central to local and national strategies in England for promoting health and wellbeing and reducing health inequalities and will lead to services that better meet people's needs.

NHS Long Term Plan

Reducing suicides is a priority as part of the NHS Long Term Plan, and the current suicide prevention programme will cover every local area in the country. A new Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme will focus on suicide prevention and reduction for mental health inpatients. All systems will have suicide bereavement support services providing timely and appropriate support to families and staff.

A group of young people sat in a semi circle as part of talking therapy.

Finding the right information

Our guidelines make evidence-based recommendations on topics ranging from preventing and managing specific conditions to planning broader services and interventions to improve the health of communities. They guide decisions about health and care by practitioners, providers, commissioners, service planners and users, and promote integrated care if appropriate.

There are several guidelines that support local partnerships to deliver evidence-based services and care supporting mental wellbeing, suicide prevention and community engagement. The easiest way to find all our guidance on these topics is to go to our topic pages on mental health and wellbeing and mental health and behavioural conditions.

The main areas of NICE guidance for mental wellbeing and suicide prevention are:

Making decisions can be affected by things like learning disability, dementia and mental health conditions. The NICE guidance on decision-making and mental capacity can help staff use the Mental Capacity Act.

An illustration of a group of doctors talking with speech bubbles above their heads.

Using quality standards to make an impact on care and support

Quality standards contain a list of quality statements, each describing a priority area for quality improvement. They include metrics that can be a useful source of key performance indicators or performance metrics for system-wide performance dashboards. They help you identify areas to make high impact improvements in dementia. See how to use quality standards for more information.

Our quality standards relevant to mental wellbeing, suicide prevention and groups at high-risk of suicide and mental ill health include:

Support for improving quality

We publish a range of tools and resources to help with putting our guidance and quality standards into practice. You can find these on the ‘Tools and resources’ tab for each piece of guidance or standard. They include:

  • baseline assessment tools (for all guidelines) and a quality standard service improvement template (for all quality standards) to assess whether your services are in line with our guidelines and quality standards
  • shared learning case studies showing how organisations have used the guidance or quality standards in practice.

Shared learning case studies

Our shared learning collection contains over 800 case studies showing how organisations around the UK have used NICE guidance and standards to improve the quality of health and social care services.

Dignity and self-harm: user experiences of emergency care - Healthwatch Bucks

Mental health and wellbeing is a priority area for Healthwatch Bucks. Healthwatch Bucks wanted to find out about the experiences of people treated in A&E after a self-harm injury and to see if our guideline on self-harm in over 8s was being followed. As a result of the project, a comprehensive action plan was developed aimed at supporting the implementation of our guidelines.

From innovation to mainstream – taking forward patient and public involvement in Bradford District Care Trust

This is a review of patient and public involvement in Bradford District Care Foundation Trust, following the expansion of mental health and learning disability services. The review was to check whether the Trust was in line with our guideline on community engagement. This guidance recommends that local communities, community and voluntary sector organisations and statutory services work together to plan, design, develop, deliver and evaluate health and wellbeing initiatives.

As a result of the review, the Trust developed a strategy led by the Deputy CEO to implement the review recommendations and make community engagement central to everything it does.

A cartoon of 5 people talking with speech bubbles above their head.

Other resources

An illustration representing mental health resources.

There are various other tools and resources that support implementation. These differ depending on the need for additional implementation support. Our guideline on self-harm in over 8s shows an example of the types of resources available:

NICE impact report on mental health

The impact report highlights progress made by the health and care system in implementing NICE guidance. It can be used to inform benchmarking and planning.