A SENIOR official with the Health Service Executive (HSE) said yesterday it was very difficult to predict whether the Government’s target of reducing the national suicide rate by 20 per cent by the year 2012 can be achieved.
Dr Patrick Doorley, national director of population health with the HSE, told the Oireachtas subcommittee on suicide that “target setting is a very, very inexact science” and to some extent it was “guesswork”, but the HSE was working with other groups to try to achieve it. Whether the target could be achieved was “very very difficult to say”, he added.
Geoff Day, director of the HSE’s National Office for Suicide Prevention, told the committee the targets could only be achieved by collective action. It was “everyone’s problem”, he said.
The committee heard that the official number of deaths by suicide recorded in the State in recent years was just under 500 a year, but that rates could be higher if deaths in road crashes which were believed to be suicides were taken into account. It also heard Ireland had the fifth-highest rate for youth suicide in the EU.
Committee chairman and Fine Gael TD Dan Neville put it to the HSE that the only progress made in implementing recommendations from an Oireachtas committee report on suicide published in mid-2006 were “discussions” and the setting up of subgroups to look at the recommendations, but there had been no real action.
Mr Day said in response that a significant number of actions had been initiated. There had, for example, been improvements in self-harm response through hospital AE departments, and the HSE was working on a number of projects using new technology like social networking websites, such as Bebo, to get across messages on suicide prevention.
The committee also heard that three of the 11 suicide resource officer posts were vacant. Senator Mary White (Fianna Fáil) said these posts covered counties Cavan, Monaghan, Louth, Meath, Wicklow and parts of Dublin.
Dr Doorley said the HSE was working to fill one of these posts but made no commitment in relation to the filling of the other two.
“Recruitment is difficult in the HSE at the moment, even for clinical staff,” he said.