He attends a youth group, First Floor, an orientation and harm prevention programme which is fun too, run with the West Yorkshire Playhouse theatre, and – here Ahsanullah smiles brightly – he has made friends there as well.
This suggests the need for self-harm prevention programmes to be more focused upon younger adolescents (aged 12/13) before self-harming has become established.
Schools offer an accessible and convenient location for the delivery of self-harm prevention programmes which could potentially be widely provided, i.e. universally provided to all children as part of the school curriculum from the age of 12 years.
Our findings support adopting this broader approach, and suggest that self-harm prevention programmes should promote skills to minimise risk taking behaviour such as cannabis and drug misuse and to facilitate the development of supportive relationships.
Twenty-nine (91%) teams implemented an exercise-based injury prevention programme.
The charity provides training to teachers, youth workers, mental health staff and prison workers to deliver its own "gambling-related harm-prevention programme".
Government agencies have indicated they are uncomfortable with their aid being used to fund harm reduction, but now there are moves to cancel any US support for HIV prevention programmes that include harm reduction measures: the very measures that are proven to be most effective in averting epidemics.
This research is important because BC has a comprehensive oral cancer prevention programme, and the results of our research will help in the development of neighbourhood-based targeted approaches for health promotion, harm reduction, oral cancer screening, and prevention programmes for the most vulnerable and highest-risk population groups.
The harm reduction agenda continues to face many challenges including resistance to substitution treatment, the harm from drug treatment, from poorly designed drug prevention programmes and from repressive counter-narcotics policies and practices.
The findings of this study suggest these prevention programmes need to address the gap between perceptions of self-harm held by adolescents and service providers on dimensions including the seriousness and importance of these acts.
First, given that the majority of episodes of self-harm in this age-group do not result in presentation to medical or mental health services, the delivery of effective community-based prevention programmes is extremely important in addition to efforts to improve clinical services for people who harm themselves.
