Suicide Prevention eLearning

Suicide Prevention eLearning –
‘We Need to Talk About Suicide’

The brief

Every year over 5000 deaths by suicide are recorded in the UK, and suicide is the biggest single cause of death amongst men aged 20-49.

Health Education England and Public Health England commissioned Hyperfine Media to create a course aimed at raising awareness of suicide. The goal of the course was to empower people to intervene when they had concerns that someone might be at risk of suicide, and to signpost appropriate support. The course had to include an element of interactivity and be delivered as a widely accessible online resource.
The completed course can be viewed in full here (NB takes 60-90 minutes to complete), and below we’ll go into more detail about the production process for this complex but rewarding project.

Hyperfine went above and beyond the work described in the specification. The suicide prevention eLearning package has been very well received by public health teams and their colleagues.

Annie Murray, Project Mental Health Lead, Public Health England

Research

Throughout the project Hyperfine reported to a steering committee comprised of over 20 organisations who have experience of dealing with suicide and its aftermath, and we were able to draw on their experience in creating the course content.
We realised the training had to be rooted in the real-life experience of individuals affected by suicide and over a 3-month period we arranged and conducted a series of field interviews by phone and in person. Around a dozen of these were filmed for use in the training. This included interviews with family members who had lost a loved one to suicide, mental health professionals, emergency service personnel, academics and other public sector workers. Many of these were personal in nature and we had to be aware of the emotional sensitivity around the subject.

Suicide Prevention video behind the scenes

Example excerpt from the video interviews:

Alongside these interviews we convened three focus groups – public sector, emergency services, and support workers – to discuss and share their experiences.

From these interviews and focus groups we identified a series of key themes around suicide, such as contributing factors, warning signs, what to say to someone when you have concerns, and signposting further help.

Following the research period we proposed a number of different scenarios which we believed touched on the most important aspects of suicide prevention. These covered a wide variety of people across different ages, genders, ethnicity and social status. The scenarios were agreed with the steering committee before production commenced. To emphasise the importance of breaking the taboo around suicide, we suggested the course title ‘We need to talk about suicide’.

Video Production

Production of the ‘We need to talk about suicide’ films took place over 6 months, including:

Fully scripting four 10 minute dramas based on real-world experiences which covered the key learning points. Each script included an element of interactivity where the viewer would be able to make choices based on the scenario.
Casting 3-4 actors for each drama, including shortlisting and auditioning actors for each role
Identifying around a dozen locations for filming, including a warehouse, pub, gym, library, pharmacist and several houses and apartments
Filming with a four man crew (Director, camera operator, sound recordist and production assistant) across a four week period
Editing the films. Each film was broken into several shorter sections and included static screens where text and user options are displayed in the training platform.

An example of one section from ‘Bob’s story’ can be viewed here:

eLearning development

Alongside the video production we worked with eLearning specialists eGenius to create an interactive course. This consisted of:

• Approximately 100 slides of written content

• Clips from the research interviews

• The embedded interactive video scenarios, including user options to influence the way the video storylines unfolded

• A ‘knowledge bank’ containing additional information, more video content and links to external organisations

The training course was made available as a freely available online resource, and as a SCORM training package which could be uploaded to organisations’ internal training platforms.

Results

The course was launched in October 2018 and was subsequently adopted by dozens of organisations, including Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service, various councils, and numerous health and care bodies. A follow-up piece of work assessed the effectiveness of the training and it was found by the majority of users to be a highly impactful and valuable resource.

Suicide Prevention eLearning