Compassionate Foundations: Suicide prevention capability suite

Compassionate Foundations is designed to support you to build your interpersonal and self-care skills to foster positive human-to-human interactions that promote connection and understanding. The purpose of the suite is to help you provide early support to people before their experience leads them to become distressed and/or suicidal, in the understanding that a simple act of compassion may be the life-raft a person needs to hold on to hope.

The skills within Compassionate Foundations include being compassionate, being aware of the needs of people in vulnerable situations, understanding why people may become distressed and knowing how to have a helpful and safe conversation with someone who may be showing early signs of distress.

This content has been provided by the APS Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Unit, Australian Public Service Commission. © Commonwealth of Australia 2022.

Participant benefits

• Describe your role in suicide prevention.
• Describe how extreme stress and adversity impacts individuals and the community.
• Use trauma-informed skills, compassion and self-compassion.
• Use look, listen and link skills to support someone in distress.
• Describe the factors that lead someone to suicidal distress.
• Outline the importance of self-care.

Suitable for

All staff.

Category and User level 

This learning experience aligns with APS People at the Foundation level.

Considerations

❕ This program contains discussion on psychological trauma and adversity, distress, suicide and self-harm. If you are emotionally impacted by the information presented, please seek support and speak with your team leader/manager or human resources area. Support is also available from:

• your agency’s Employee Assistance Program
• Lifeline on 13 11 14 or by text on 0477 13 11 14 (available 24/7)
• 13YARN on 13 92 76 (available 24/7) for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467 (available 24/7).

The suite is self-paced. Participants are encouraged to not schedule in heavy work activity immediately following the course and to take breaks between modules to consolidate learning and/or if emotionally impacted by the content.

Price

Free of charge.

Related topics

Personal and social capability; APS People; Health and wellbeing; Values; Relationships; Leading in the APS; Communication; Working in teams.

Accreditation

Compassionate Foundations has been formally and independently accredited against Suicide Prevention Australia's Standards for Quality Improvement. Accreditation against these nationally recognised standards provides assurance of the safety, effectiveness and impact of the Compassionate Foundations suicide prevention suite.

Awards

Compassionate Foundations won the Spirit of the Service Award – Learning category at the 2023 Institute of Public Administration ACT annual event. This award recognises initiatives that deliberately engaged with risk to address complex problems.

Compassionate Foundations received the Gold LearnX Award for Best eLearning Project – Widespread eLearning adopter at the 2022 LearnX Summit and Awards Show. This award focuses on an eLearning project that has been successfully implemented enterprise-wide to support learning and development.