'Making the journey easier': an evaluation of community- and clinician-targeted rural suicide prevention workshops

For more than eight years the Farm-Link program has delivered suicide prevention skills workshops to members of rural communities, particularly to people from sectors such as finance and agriculture who work closely with farmers likely to experience mental distress. In the course of this work it became apparent that if Farm-Link was going to have a role in advising community members on 'where to get help', it also had a responsibility to ensure that health professionals providing that help had the skills and knowledge to support people who were thinking about or considering suicide. Farm-Link partnered with Black Dog Institute to roll out their recently developed 'Advanced Training in Suicide Prevention' to health professionals, particularly General Practitioners and Psychologists, in the Farm-Link target area. An evaluation, comprising a series of questionnaires and qualitative interviews, is currently being conducted to examine the two complementary aspects of Farm-Link's suicide prevention work; the delivery of Suicide Prevention Skills Workshops to rural community members, and delivery of Black Dog Institute's suicide prevention training to rural health professionals. This presentation reports on the preliminary findings of this evaluation. It reports on the experiences of community members and health professionals who have sought to apply mental health and suicide prevention skills in their everyday lives and practices. The findings of the evaluation highlight that Farm-Link's suicide prevention training has real transformative potential for community members who, sometimes for the first time, have an opportunity to reflect on their role in promoting positive mental health. However, findings also suggest challenges for maintaining and sustaining the momentum that is generated in short-term training approaches. The partnership approach to delivering suicide prevention training to health professionals highlights the importance of collaboration, recognising that multi-tiered approaches are important, that draw on the existing strengths and resources of communities and associated institutions.