Comprehensive Investigation into Self-Harm & Ideation
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A comprehensive investigation into self-harm and ideation in Northern Ireland: a quantitative data linkage approach
IRAS ID
332408
Contact name
Aideen Maguire
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen's University Belfast
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 11 months, 30 days
Research summary
Self-Harm and suicide ideation (i.e. thoughts about dying by suicide) are two of the most important known risk factors for death by suicide. Increasing suicide rates are a major public health concern and Northern Ireland consistently has the highest rate of suicide in the UK and Ireland. Recent policies to reduce the rates of suicide are now including a focus on reducing self-harm and suicide ideation as these are known precursors to suicide. However, little is known about the causes of self-harm or suicide ideation, how these two factors are related and what impact they have on mortality risk either individually or in combination. Understanding the individual level, household-level, area-level and health related predictors for self-harm, ideation and suicide is of vital public health importance so that intervention services can be targeted accurately.
Northern Ireland is unique in that it has a national Registry of Self-Harm that has collated information on all presentations to emergency departments for self-harm and self-harm / suicide ideation since 2008 (approximately 8,000 per/year) and the research team has secured access to these data from the data custodians in each of the five Health and Social Care Trusts. The proposed project will link these data to primary care registration data, prescription medication data, geographical and death data to better understand the antecedents to and outcomes of self-harm and self-harm / suicide ideation, including mortality risk. Trend analysis will explore trends in self-harm and ideation and associated risk over the last 15 years as well as model potential future trends. Lastly the project will attempt to evaluate the self-harm intervention programme (SHIP), making use of a natural experiment design as SHIP was initiated in the Western Trust before being rolled out in the other four Trusts in 2015. The findings from this project will help identify individuals most at risk and target effective interventions to improve outcomes post self-harm / ideation and reduce suicide risk.
REC name
HSC REC B
REC reference
23/NI/0145
Date of REC Opinion
17 Oct 2023
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion