MORE volunteers are needed at the Salisbury and District Samaritans branch.

Speaking at the branch's AGM this month, management committee chairman Simon Hearn, emphasised the need for more volunteers to ensure the branch, which will be celebrating its 55th anniversary next year, can continue to offer support to the thousands of people whose calls, email and texts come through to Salisbury each year.

The meeting heard one person contacts Samaritans every six seconds and one person takes their life every 90 minutes.

At the AGM on July 5, which was attended by more than 40 members of the local branch, they welcomed the charity's chief executive Ruth Sutherland.

In her presentation she gave statistics regarding suicides in the UK and Republic of Ireland — 6122 in 2014, with men more likely than women to take their lives, while middle-aged men (35 to 55 years), on low incomes, were 10 times more likely to kill themselves.

The meeting heard that although there has been a slight decrease in the number of suicides overall, there has been an increase among women.

Ruth also spoke of the work being done to improve how the charity respond to callers, by up-grading systems for answering not only phone calls, but emails and text messages. She said reaching out into the community, the armed services and high-risk groups through more publicity was a priority.

However, she said this could only be effective if there were sufficient volunteers to provide the service to an ever-increasing number of callers.

To find out more about the different volunteering roles email recruit@samaritansofsalisbury.org.uk, call 01722 330672 or go to samaritans.org/volunteer-us