No one is required to count

Ask how many emergency services personnel died by suicide last year, and no one can give you a reliable answer.

Not because the number is small. Because no one is required to count.

There is no consistent national recording of deaths by suicide across the emergency services. No single source of truth. No clear accountability. No duty on any service to record, report or act.

This is the part worth sitting with. In organisations built on data, audit and learning from harm, one category of death goes uncounted. A police force can tell you its response times to three decimal places. It cannot tell you how many of its people it has lost this way.

The absence of data is not the absence of a problem. It means the scale is not understood, and neither is what to do about it. You cannot govern what you refuse to measure.

We are not asking anyone to accept a figure. We are asking why there isn’t one.

If this is a gap you recognise in your own service, we would value the conversation.