Suicide Risk Assessment
Suicide Risk Assessment 6 Steps to a Better Instrument
Suicide Risk Assessment 6 Steps to a Better Instrument There are many challenges in working on an inpatient psychiatric unit. One common problem that continues to come up is the evaluating process for suicidal ideation and determining which patients require suicide precautions. According to Hermes, Deakin & Robinson (2009) in their article in Journal Of Psychosocial Nursing. Hermes et al. discussed the process that twelve nurses from a 35-bed adult psychiatric unit in Springfield, Illinois went through as they evaluated their current process of suicide risk assessment and work toward a new and improved tool. This team of nurses decided their current tool did not meet their needs because it was not identifying the correct patients. Based on their clinical expertise and judgment this group felt many patients were being placed on suicide precautions inappropriately and other patients that should have been identified as at risk were not being flagged. This team worked for 8 hrs a month and over a year's time to complete this six step process The six steps included: recognize & define problem, determine if topic is a priority, form a team, assemble and critique the research, pilot the change in practice and implement the change. As they reviewed the eleven studies that were found that addressed assessment of inpatient suicide risk, it quickly became evident that many traditional suicide risk assessment models identified the chronic patients at risk for suicide, but did not identify the truly lethal ones. Many experts stressed that the patients more likely to harm themselves showed increased signs of agitation and anxiety. In one case study of 76 patients that had committed suicide while hospitalized found that 79% of the sample exhibited evidence of severe agitation or anxiety. Busch et al. (2003). Many of the studies showed that patients were pharmacologically undertreated for anxiety and
Suicide Risk Assessment 6 Steps to a Better Instrument There are many challenges in working on an inpatient psychiatric unit. One common problem that continues to come up is the evaluating process for suicidal ideation and determining which patients require suicide precautions. According to Hermes, Deakin & Robinson (2009) in their article in Journal Of Psychosocial Nursing. Hermes et al. discussed the process that twelve nurses from a 35-bed adult psychiatric unit in Springfield, Illinois went through as they evaluated their current process of suicide risk assessment and work toward a new and improved tool. This team of nurses decided their current tool did not meet their needs because it was not identifying the correct patients. Based on their clinical expertise and judgment this group felt many patients were being placed on suicide precautions inappropriately and other patients that should have been identified as at risk were not being flagged. This team worked for 8 hrs a month and over a year's time to complete this six step process The six steps included: recognize & define problem, determine if topic is a priority, form a team, assemble and critique the research, pilot the change in practice and implement the change. As they reviewed the eleven studies that were found that addressed assessment of inpatient suicide risk, it quickly became evident that many traditional suicide risk assessment models identified the chronic patients at risk for suicide, but did not identify the truly lethal ones. Many experts stressed that the patients more likely to harm themselves showed increased signs of agitation and anxiety. In one case study of 76 patients that had committed suicide while hospitalized found that 79% of the sample exhibited evidence of severe agitation or anxiety. Busch et al. (2003). Many of the studies showed that patients were pharmacologically undertreated for anxiety and