About safety planning

Safety planning helps you to make sense of and understand your thoughts and behaviours in relation to suicidal intent. It helps you to think about what support you have in place and what you can do that can help you if you’re feel distressed. Everyone can benefit from creating a safety plan.

At Mersey Care, we have a safety planning intervention that has been developed for all those in our care.

You may find that our brief safety flashcard can help you, as well as others, to see you through a crisis. It is used to identify the things that you and others can do to support you.    

Some people find it helpful to write a safety flashcard, so that if they feel suicidal, they have a reminder of what they can or have done before that helps, some potential solutions to try for problems faced and who they can contact and what helps them cope.  

You can write the flashcard when you’re feeling well, so you have a personal strategy for coping.

A safety flashcard doesn’t need to be complicated. It might just include:

  • Distraction techniques and coping strategies that have worked for you in the past.
  • Other ways you might keep yourself safe and avoid acting on suicidal thoughts. 
  • Numbers you can call.
  • Services you can contact.

Safety plan templates

You may have completed a safety plan with one of our services already but if you haven't, you can create your own full safety plan or a shortened flashcard version using the templates below: 

If you're looking for some tips, links to websites, materials that might help you with some common problems when completing your safety plan, have a look at our self-help resources booklet

Guides to safety planning

The guides below share information about how safety planning works and how it can be useful:

Related pages

Find out more about the safety planning work we do at Mersey Care

Related publications