Mental health and specialist services in Australia’s Gold Coast have published two articles of leading interest (November 2020). The first outlines the process and results of implementing a Zero Suicide Framework (Turner et al., 2020), and the second describes the clinical Suicide Prevention Pathway (Stapelberg et al., 2020).
Turner et al.’s article explains the practical steps taken by the service to implement the Zero Suicide Framework and they found it resulted in:
- Improved processes
- Improved staff skills and confidence
- Embedded positive cultural change
- Improved innovations (including the use of machine learning for the identification of suicide presentations)
- Reduced rate of repeated suicide attempts and deaths by suicide.
Stapelberg et al.’s article did an in-depth analysis of the impact of implementing the framework through the Suicide Prevention Pathway.
They found that placing someone on the pathway both reduced their risk for a repeated suicide attempt by 65%, and extended the time between repeated attempts. This effect was similar across all patient groups studied.
References:
Turner, K. et al. (2020). Implementing a systems approach to suicide prevention in a mental health service using the Zero Suicide Framework. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0004867420971698
Stapelberg, N. et al. (2020). Efficacy of the Zero Suicide framework in reducing recurrent suicide attempts: cross-sectional and time-to-recurrent-event analyses. The British Journal of Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2020.190