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Charity Mental Health External Provision

User ID	Claire Giraud
Hidden Email	c.giraud@ascensiontrust.org.uk
Company/organisation name	Bridge Watch under the auspice of the ascesion trust
Person(s) Completing form	Claire Giraud
Title for accreditation (name of initiative, or name of policy etc.). Leave blank if not relevant.	Bridge Watch
1.1 Mental Health Support Provision Attach evidence of a mental health support provision that has been implemented by the charity. (If you are unable to provide links, please email to tick@tickaccreditation.com)	Bridge Watch (BW) is a suicide prevention charitable project of the Ascension Trust. BW provides a presence of trained volunteers on the 5 City Bridge Foundation (CBF) owned bridges in Central London with the purpose of identifying and supporting individuals intent on entering the water for, but not solely, the purpose of suicide (the 5 CBF are the second public location for suicide in this country – this information is confidential as per the samaritans reporting on suicide guidelines) https://bridgewatch.uk
2.1 How do you identify and respond to the mental health needs of the people you support?	The trained volunteers patrol the bridges and look for individuals who exhibit signs of mental health distress, they will then approach the person and have a conversation, depending on the situation they will signpost the person, take them to a nearby coffee shop for a chat or contact the City of London police control room so that the mental health street triage can attend and assess the person and decide if they need to be sectioned under section 136 of the mental health act or if they can be released in the care of a loved one. In some cases, the RNLI are called to make sure the person will be recovered should they decide to enter the water.
2.2 How do you ensure that your mental health provision is evidence-informed, appropriate and suitable for the people you support?	Bridge watch was co-founded by the water safety lead for the south east at the Royal National Lifeboat Institute and the city of London corporation suicide prevention lead (she is an international expert in suicide prevention who has won numerous awards for her world leading work on suicide prevention). She is a member of the public health team for both the City and Hackney and has done numerous audits to evidence the need for patrols at the 5 CBF bridges, the data is confidential but her annual report states that between January 2024 to March 2025 there have been over 250 suicide attempts and contemplation from the 5 CBF Bridges with over 5 casualties making those bridges the second voluntary drowning cluster in the country. The City of London Corporation’s suicide prevention action plan has been commanded for its quality by Healthwatch and Public Health England – it was even used as a template by the concordat for the prevention of Better mental health, it has over 69 actions to reduce suicide incidents in the square mile. The Bridge Watch patrols were mobilised after many other avenues were explored, both in terms of crisis intervention as well as upstream prevention. Patrols for suicide prevention are not a new idea (Beachy Heads chaplaincy, Claddagh Watch, Wexford Marine Watch) and are based on the principle that after reducing access to means, human intervention is the second best strategy to prevent suicides. The volunteers are trained in ASSIST (suicide intervention training) which is currently the gold standard for suicide intervention and awareness trainings, it is two days long, with two trainers, some role playing. In addition the Bridge watch volunteers have shadowed the mental health clinician who operates the City’s mental health street triage, this clinician has invaluable experience in the field having overseen over 850 interventions since the start of the service in 2017. Since its first pilot patrols in December 2023, Bridge Watch has achieved 2232 hours of patrol and 169 interventions (61 of which were suicidal individuals who said they would jump thus saving £69,000 in water rescue for the RNLI and even more for the U.K economy with a suicide estimated to cost 1.67 million by LSE researchers in 2016), the number of volunteers is now at 81. Bridge watch was also fortunate enough to secure an academic evaluation via the national institute for health care and research and this evaluation gave the programme lead recommendations to implement to make Bridge Watch even more efficient. https://phirst.nihr.ac.uk/evaluations/london-bridge-watch/
2.3 How do you ensure that your mental health provision is accessible to those who may need it, taking account of different needs, circumstances and preferences?	The volunteers will help anyone in distress that they encounter on the bridges or around, there is no problem in terms of access or discrimination when it comes to Bridge Watch given the nature of its operating model. To signpost the volunteers can use the Make every contact count website or look up provisions in the LA of residence of the service users, they however have no power over accessibility of these resources
3.1 How do you monitor the delivery, use and effectiveness of your mental health provision?	The BW coordinator, with the help of the COL Public Health Suicide Prevention lead, produces monthly detailed datasets of the patrols and the various types of interventions that took place. These are then analysed against data from other services (mental health street triage, CoLP, Thrive LDN, MET maritime police) to get a full picture of suicide incidents in the square mile and along the river. Additionally, detailed case studies are reviewed by partners and stakeholders at various multi agency meetings to help implement prevention and intervention strategies. An application was submitted to the Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Team (PHIRST) funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to provide an academic evaluation of the BW initiative. This was approved and we are now working in collaboration with academic teams to evaluate this public health intervention. Our academic partners initially carried out an evaluability assessment with a wide range of stakeholders to co-develop an evaluation plan for BW – report available here. The agreed evaluation design involves both a quantitative and a qualitative component, with an interim report to provide working findings to the BW team. The study protocol can be found here. The quantitative analysis is due to commence in February 2025 and will use data from the CoLP to assess the impact of BW on the numbers of people attempting and completing suicide from the five CoL bridges. As part of the qualitative evaluation, academic researchers have interviewed 27 project volunteers and stakeholders and collected 4 volunteer reflective diaries to evaluate whether the BW volunteer training is effective, the potential impacts on volunteers’ sense of wellbeing and confidence, and how the project can be improved. A preliminary qualitative findings report came out in February 2025, it focused on key emerging findings and considerations for the development of the BW programme. A longer interim qualitative report which builds on these findings were available in Spring 2025, followed by a final project report which includes quantitative and qualitative findings in Summer 2025. A second quantitative analysis will be run in the summer of 2027 as there was a limited dataset for the first round of analysis.
3.2 How do you measure the impact of your mental health provision and use the findings to develop and improve it?	As a result of the NIHR PHIRST fusion team evaluation, the bridge watch programme lead devised an action plan which is monitored monthly and reviewed once a year by the programme lead, the two co-founders and the COO of ascension trust the quantitative analysis of the NIHR PHIRST fusion evaluation will also be reran in May 2027 for free which should give us a good idea of progress between 2025 and 2027, in addition we continue to collect data on interventions and monitor it for trends and potential change to the hours of patrols
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