June 11th 2015
In attendance: Paul M. Crowley, Kieran O’Shea and Carol Anne Hennessy (CSO), Bernadette Smith (GRO), Brian Farrell (Coroner Dublin City and County), Myra Cullinane (Cork City Coroner), Sara Parsons (Garda Siochana), Deirdre O'Reilly (Irish Prison Service representing the Department of Justice), Gerry Raleigh (National Office for Suicide Prevention), Ciaran Austin (Console), Sarah Craig (Health Research Board), Ella Arensman and Eileen Williamson (NSRF).
Apologies: Colm Desmond (Department of Health), Ivan Perry (Department of Epidemiology & Public Health, University College Cork).
Paul Crowley welcomed attendees to the second meeting of the CSO Liaison Group on Suicide Mortality Statistics and thanked them for agreeing to become members. Paul outlined the broad aim of the group which is, to improve communications in relation to the interpretation and dissemination of suicide mortality statistics between the key stakeholders in Ireland. The Terms of Reference for the Group had been circulated with the invitation from the CSO.
The Minutes of the meeting held in the CSO Cork on January 28th 2015 were unanimously accepted. No matters arising
Paul Crowley outlined the procedures that the CSO follows in coding unnatural deaths, late registered deaths and the use of Form 104 in this process. A paper by Corcoran and Arensman (A Study of the Irish System of Recording Suicide Deaths) had been sent as an accompanying document to the Agenda. Following discussion, it was agreed that all members would review Form 104 and would revert with comments which would then be circulated to all members and discussed at the next meeting.
Carol Anne Hennessy reported on the CSO proposal to match all suicide deaths for the period from 2007 to 2012 inclusive to the census/geo-directory files. The purpose of this exercise is to match these files at the lowest possible level. The CSO hopes, at least, to derive the deprivation index in respect of suicide deaths. The CSO will report back to the liaison group in due course.
Gerry Raleigh gave an overview of the new National Strategic Framework for Suicide Prevention 2015-2020 entitled Connecting for Life which will be launched by the Taoiseach and Minister with responsibility for Mental Health, Ms Kathleen Lynch TD on June 24th. Gerry stated that it would be an outcomes-based framework with the objective of reducing rates of self-harm and suicide in line with World Health Organisation guidelines and in this context outlined the need for robust data on deaths due to suicide.
Ella Arensman explained why real-time data was important to inform suicide prevention initiatives, in particular in relation to recognising new methods of suicide and potential clusters.
Gerry Raleigh informed the group that a National Research and Evaluation Plan would be put in place to support the new National Strategy and outlined the need to build data gathering systems.
Paul Crowley said that the CSO would help as best they could with regard to the timeliness and depth of suicide mortality data.
Ella Arensman noted that confusion arises in the media between the year of registration and year of occurrence data when journalists report on the CSO Vital Statistics releases.
Eileen Williamson noted that the commentary published by the CSO in September 2014 in relation to suicide statistics 2011 gave excellent background information on the process of determining and registering deaths due to suicide in Ireland. Carol Anne Hennessy undertook to forward a link to the commentary to all members of the group
The CSO has facilitated a PhD student (Irene O'Farrell) from the NSRF who has done extensive work on matching data from the National Registry of Deliberate Self-Harm with suicide mortality data. There was agreement that there would be value in continuing this work. The CSO and the NSRF will discuss how this will happen beyond the time of Irene's PhD. The NSRF agreed to circulate the publications relating to this research to the members of the group.
Ella Arensman tabled an in-press (International Journal of Epidemiology) publication by Corcoran and colleagues at the NSRF in which they report the findings of a time trend analysis which they conducted on Irish suicide mortality data for the period of the economic recession, 2008 to 2012. The research showed that the male suicide rate was 57% higher by the end of 2012 than if the pre-recession trend had continued. The findings of the paper are in contrast with a recent report in the Irish Medical Times which suggested that deaths by suicide had not increased during the economic recession in Ireland.
There being no further business, the meeting ended at 12.45pm.
It was decided to hold the next meeting in Dublin in October 2015, the date to be decided.