Preventing suicide in car parks

Multi-storey car parks are open structures, providing easy access to great heights, from which jumping offers a perceived or believed higher certainty of death.  Consequently, it's important to minimise potential risks and work with experts to provide information and access to learning material and training.

A number of effective steps can be taken to prevent car parks from being used and to increase the chances of a last-minute intervention.  Many of these resonate with the Safer Parking Scheme and Park Mark award, such as CCTV or foot patrol surveillance, good lighting and a clean environment and we encourage car park operators to consider joining the scheme in conjunction with implementing a suicide prevention strategy.

Suicide can be prevented and any risk identified and mitigated may save a life. We recommend that car park operators create a suicide prevention strategy and establish relationships with local police, first responders, crisis intervention professionals and suicide-prevention organisations who can provide advice and training. 

BPA publications 

• Factsheet  on Suicide Prevention: the practical steps to consider when creating a suicide prevention strategy.
• Guide on Suicide Prevention: for organisations that design, build, manage, or operate multi-storey car parks, and includes the legislation and responsibilities.
• BPA members can watch two webinars devoted to suicide prevention on the links below. 

Reporting suicides 
The Samaritans guidelines on media handling and communications around suicides is a very useful resource that everyone, especially journalists need to follow. 

Other useful links
Webinar Part 1: Discussing suicide prevention (BPA member-only resource)
Webinar Part 2: Preventing suicides in car parks (BPA member-only resource)
Suicide prevention strategy for England: 2023 to 2028 - published Sept 2023
Preventing trauma and tragedy - Ernest Davies 2021 award winning entry