Dear University of St Andrews,

A ‘serious incident’ is an adverse event, with significant harmful or potentially harmful consequences, and/or where the effectiveness of the university response is likely to have a significant impact on the health, wellbeing or welfare of a student, their family and/or the community.

Serious incidents should be investigated, in order to identify any factors that might have contributed towards the incident occurring, and the fundamental issues (or root causes) that underpin them. It affords a no-blame opportunity to review what happened; what was done well/ the good practise points; areas of concern, if there are any, and importantly what lessons can be learned.

UUK’s Suicide-Safer Universities (2018) guidance recommends that serious incident investigations be conducted following a student death. The need for such a report has been highlighted by Ministers and at least one Coroner. The sharing of experiences, best practises and relevant knowledge with others is similarly advocated. Serious incident investigations should also as a matter of course be carried out in cases of attempted suicide, near misses, parasuicide, and non-suicidal self-injury.

So, with regard to the health, wellbeing or welfare of one or more students. For each of the academic periods 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21:
a) How many serious incident investigations has the University of St Andrews conducted?
b) How many serious incident reports has the University of St Andrews produced?
c) How many serious incidents involved a fatality?
d) How many serious incident reports and/or their findings has the Universityn of St. Andrews shared with other institutions?
e) How many serious incident reports and/or their findings have other institutions shared with you?
For each report in (d) and (e), please specify the different types of institution that were involved in the sharing e.g., other university, UUK, NHS, PHE, Mental Health Trust, OfS, DfE, etc

Yours sincerely,

Johanna Langheld