This evaluated the impact of the Mates in Construction (MATE) program over a 5-year period on suicides in Queensland construction workers between 2003-2007 vs 2008-2012 (MATES was introduced in 2008).
MATES is a large-scale, multi-component suicide prevention program for construction which uses onsite psychoeducation to encourage help-seeking & early intervention, counselling services and people trained in suicide first aid etc.
Suicide rates were taken from the Australian National Coroners Information System. Of the 426 suicides in the Qld construction industry b.t. 03-07, two were female. This study therefore focused on males.
Results:
Reviewing the first five years of MATES in Qld, it was found that it had acceptability from workers, unions & construction companies. However, funding constraints & the size & geography of Qld limited its overall reach to 35,761 construction workers.
The overall male suicide rate for Qld rose during the 5-year period b.t. 2008-12 but in contrast, the age-adjusted male suicide rate in the Qld construction industry decreased 7.9% for the years 2008-12.
Despite appearing promising about the impact of initiatives on construction suicide rates, the apparent reduction wasn’t statistically significant. A reduction in suicide for lesser skilled workers (labourers, machine operators) also wasn’t statistically significant.
Authors note that the “The low base rate of suicide has always made it difficult to analyse programs designed to reduce suicide, due to low statistical power”. They hoped that analysing 5 years of data would help address this limitation and while the number of workers trained in MATES is impressive in scope when compared to the limited available resources, the statistical models suffered from a lack of power due to sample size.
Authors say that suicide is the “end point of a complex set of bio-psycho-social circumstances, and there are other wider influences to be considered”. Thus it’s difficult to study and influenced by a range of factors including general growth in the construction industry.
Finally, although male construction worker suicides appear to have declined b.t. 2008-12 in comparison with the previous 5 year period, statistical significance wasn’t achieved. While these results are interesting, it remains inconclusive to claim that MATES was causal in reducing suicide rate and a further planned study at 10 years may better confirm the impact.
Nevertheless, MATES and other programs may have other more general impacts like increasing help-seeking behaviour.
Link: https://doi.org/10.4172/2161-0711.1000465
SafetyInsights.org 