Evaluating the impact of the UK’s 2012 suicide prevention scheme on suicides in England

I was a lead supervisor of an MSc in Health and Data Analytics student summer dissertation in 2024/25 academic year with Prof. Marta Blangiardo. The dissertation was titled Evaluating the impact of the UK’s 2012 suicide prevention scheme on suicides in England. The dissertation proposal is below.

Dissertation Proposal

Background

Mental wellbeing is becoming an increasingly common health outcome with the WHO including the promotion of mental wellbeing within their sustainable development goal 3. Of mental health outcomes, suicide is one of the most severe and causes 700,00 deaths worldwide per year. In 2012, the UK implemented a suicide prevention strategy with the aim of reducing overall suicide. There is little research on evaluating the effect of the suicide prevention strategy on suicides in England. However, evaluating the impact of suicide prevention policy is crucial to ensure it was effective, identify gaps in intervention strategy, and inform of future interventions.

Aims

The goal of this project is to use mortality data from the ONS made available from Imperial Small Area Health Statistic Unit since the start of the 21st century to evaluate the effect of the UKs 2012 suicide prevention strategy (intervention). The objectives are:

a. Use Negative Outcome controls (NOC) in an interrupted time series design to draw causal inferences about the associations between the intervention and suicide.

b. Explore how the effect of the intervention differs for social and environmental profiles.

Proposed methods

This project will use intentional suicide (ICD10 Codes: X60 – X84) and non-intentional suicides (ICD10 Codes: Y10–Y34 [excluding Y33.9], Y87.0, Y87.2) from the ONS which are held by Imperials SAHSU to be used as the outcomes. These will be stratified by year and Lower Tier Local Authority (LTLA) and will come with the age-sex standardized expected suicide counts. The dataset will include local environmental data such as deprivation and ethnicity.

This project will use an interrupted time series model, we will explore the short- and long-term trends of the suicide prevention scheme (intervention) on the exposed (suicide deaths) and control (respiratory deaths) groups. The interrupted time series model will be embedded in a Bayesian hierarchical model and account for trends in space and time. We will explore how the effect of the intervention is the same or differs for different profiles (i.e., geographical region, socio-environmental characteristics) based on the area-level characteristics.