Behind the RCVS suicide prevention guide: what every workplace can take from it

This year, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons commissioned me to write the new guide on suicide prevention in the veterinary workplace. My colleague and fellow BS 30480 panel contributor, Sarah Ambrose of Sarah Ambrose Consulting, helped author it with me. The guide and supporting resources published this week. From 1 April 2026, the new RCVS Practice Standards Scheme requirement has been built on top of them, every accredited UK veterinary practice now operates a written, practice-specific suicide prevention plan.

I want to write about what we learned doing the work, because most of it is not really about vets.

The scale of the problem

The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 720,000 people die by suicide each year. Research suggests that for every life taken, another 135 people are directly affected. Suicide is a public health issue at population scale. It is also a workplace issue, and one that most organisations are still under-resourced to handle.

The RCVS, in publishing this week’s resources, made the point plainly: suicide prevention and support for those affected is everyone’s responsibility, not just those who work in healthcare or in voluntary and community organisations.

Why this guide, and why now

The veterinary profession has carried one of the highest occupational suicide rates in the UK for decades. The reasons are well-documented: access to lethal medicines, exposure to firearms, frequent lone working, the emotional weight of euthanasia, and the long shadow cast on small teams when a colleague is lost.

When the RCVS approached us, they were clear about what they did not want. Not a poster campaign. Not a wellness booklet. Not a list of helplines. They wanted a working document that practices could implement, anchored to BS 30480: Suicide and the Workplace, the British Standard launched by BSI in 2025. Sarah and I both contributed to its development.

The guide they published this week, alongside a workplace toolkit and a PSS practice checklist, sits between policy and practice. It tells leaders what to look for, what to put in place, and what to do when something goes wrong.

The patterns that travel

The veterinary profession is a useful case study for one specific reason: every risk factor that makes any workplace unsafe for someone in mental ill-health is concentrated in it. If you can write a credible suicide prevention plan for a rural mixed practice, you can write one for almost any setting.

Four patterns came up again and again while we were writing.

1. Means matter more than messaging

Most workplace suicide prevention work focuses on awareness. Posters, training days, well-meant talks. They are not useless, but they are downstream. The first job of any plan is to make the means harder to reach in a moment of crisis. For vets, it is medicines and firearms. For construction, it is heights and equipment access. For finance, it is something else again. Every sector has its means. Every leader should know what theirs are.

2. Lone working is a risk multiplier

The single biggest amplifier of risk is sustained time alone. Out-of-hours rotas, single-site working, remote and hybrid arrangements, on-call patterns. The plan does not need to eliminate lone working, that is rarely possible, but it does need to know where its people are and how it checks in with them.

3. The conversation is the intervention

Asking someone clearly whether they are thinking of suicide does not plant the idea. It opens a door. The single most useful skill a manager can have, in any sector, is the confidence to ask the question and stay in the room for the answer. Most people we trained had never been shown how.

4. Postvention is the part nobody plans for

What happens in the first hour, the first day, the first week after a suicide or a serious attempt is the hardest part of any plan, and it is the part most plans skip. Who briefs the team. Who handles external communications. Who walks alongside the people closest to the loss. Decide all of this before you need it, not after.

From awareness to action

The reason BS 30480 exists, and the reason the RCVS commissioned this guide, is that the previous decade of workplace mental health work had run out of road on awareness. We had got very good at telling people that mental ill-health exists, that it is okay to talk about it, that there is no shame. All true. None of it, on its own, has changed the numbers.

What changes the numbers is plans. Specific, owned, reviewed, drilled.

If you are a leader, an HR director, or an Occupational Health lead reading this from outside the veterinary world, the question is not whether your sector carries the same risk factors. It does, in some configuration. The question is whether your organisation has moved from awareness to action on the ones it carries.

Three things to take from the vet sector

Three things worth lifting from the work we did with the RCVS into any leader’s thinking.

1. Map your means. Sit down with someone operational and list every way the workplace itself could enable a crisis to become a death. This is uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
2. Name an owner for the plan. A document with no owner does not get used. The owner needs to be senior enough to call a meeting and close enough to the floor to know what is actually happening.
3. Train conversations, not awareness. One hour of practice asking the question is worth ten of being told the question matters.

If your organisation needs a second pair of eyes on its plan, that is what we do. Being Real supports gap analysis and implementation against BS 30480 and ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, across regulated sectors, the public sector, and FTSE-listed organisations.

The veterinary profession went first because it had to. The rest of us do not have that excuse.

The RCVS resources

The full set is publicly available on the RCVS Mind Matters site:

• Suicide prevention toolkit for veterinary workplaces (1.21 MB PDF)
• Suicide prevention workplace guide (200 KB PDF)
• PSS practice checklist (241 KB PDF)
• RCVS Mind Matters · Suicide prevention in the veterinary workplace

Crisis support

If you or a colleague needs help right now.

Samaritans: 116 123 (free, 24/7)
SHOUT: text 85258 (free, 24/7)
Vetlife Helpline: 0303 040 2551 (24/7, confidential, veterinary community)
Emergency: 999