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Understanding nurse’s perspectives in suicide safety planning and risk management for children and adolescents in Leicester

    Cohort 2025 PhD Project

    About The Project

    Suicide prevention is a global priority (WHO, 2018), and children and adolescents require special attention as rates in England are increasing (O’Connor and Robb, 2020). While many professionals work with children and adolescents who exhibit suicidal ideation, mostly this task falls to mental health professionals (Scheerder et al., 2010), with nurses playing a pivotal role (Wadey& Richardson, 2024). Working with child and adolescent self-harm and suicide, and ascertaining risk is a difficult part of the professional role (Hay et al., 2011) and designing questions to identify the nature and level of risk with this population requires careful consideration (O’Reilly et al., 2016). Nurses play a crucial role in working with children and adolescents and in suicide safety planning. While there are government related structural changes regarding NHS England, their recent work around suicide and self-harm has illustrated gaps in UK-based evidence, particularly around children and adolescents, and proposed that more attention needs to be paid to the nursing/patient therapeutic relationship, especially during crisis (NHS England,2024).

    This qualitative interview project proposes to engage local nurses working at a range of levels as experts in self-harm and suicidal ideation/behaviour. The project will seek their perspectives on identifying 1) the most effective approaches to safety planning and risk management with children and young people to meet the demographic and cultural profile of Leicester’s population, and 2) their views on the best ways to create recovery-focused care plans to attend to the needs of groups of children and young people who might be constructed as more vulnerable, such as those in care, or from diverse ethnic groups, particularly attending to the local Leicester demographic. Enhancing suicide risk safety planning is a crucial ambition of the NHS broadly but requires sensitive and developmentally appropriate tailoring when working with children and adolescents and needs to account for the local context and service provision. NHS England (2024) reports the importance of determining how to strengthen collaborative family-focused suicide risk planning, and nurses’ ideas, creativity, innovations, and perspectives can contribute to the solution. In so doing, attention needs to be paid to the nurses themselves, and therefore we additionally will seek to explore their views on keeping themselves emotionally safe in the delivery of effective care.

    This project has been co-created and is supported by researchers from University of Leicester, the De Montfort University and partners at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust. The successful candidate for this project will be enrolled at University of Leicester. 

    Project Aims 

    The overall aims of the project are:     

    1. To identify the perceived most effective approaches to safety planning and risk management when working with culturally diverse children and adolescents.
    2. To identify useful ways to create recovery-focused care plans for working with children and their families, particularly those from vulnerable groups.
    3. To identify any locally pertinent barriers and challenges that nurses foresee in implementing approaches to safety planning and risk management.
    4. To identity aspects of nurse’s emotional safety and mechanisms to support that.

    Project Team