Suicide Risk Assessment clinical trials

The Effectiveness of Interactive Discussion Group Intervention About Suicide Risk Identification and Assessment for Clinical Nurses

Suicide attempters or people with self-harm have a high percentage in seeking medical services before and after their suicidal or self-harm behaviour compared to general population. Studies revealed that apart from psychiatric services, they were more likely to seek help from doctors of various units (e.g. emergency departments, general medicine, medical-surgical units) across different healthcare systems (i.e. hospitals or district clinics). Besides, suicide event was possibly heard on in-patients of psychiatric or non-psychiatric units. People with self-harm experienced poor communication with healthcare personnel, and they perceived staff's lacking knowledge about suicide as serious problems. In Taiwan it was also found that emergency nurses and general practitioners were in need of improving negative attitudes and enhancing knowledge towards suicidal behaviour. From the point that nurses are the healthcare personnel that spend the most time with in-patients compared to others in the hospital, suicide risk assessment training may enhance nurses' attitudes and ability of risk awareness and assessment towards people with self-harm, which may in turn significantly increase the identification rate of the high risk group for suicide. Currently there is a lack of suicide training program as a reference for nursing education in Taiwan. The study therefore aims to strengthen suicide risk assessment ability among clinical nurses through interactive discussion groups. Using quasi-experimental design with randomized cluster sampling strategy, a case vignettes will be used for suicide risk assessment together with other measurements regarding suicide knowledge and attitudes for both experiment and control groups before and after the training course.