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The Joint Commission has issued a Sentinel Event Alert on preventing suicide in healthcare settings. The Alert says that the information applies to all patients in all settings.
“It’s imperative for health care providers in all settings to better detect suicide ideation in patients, and to take appropriate steps for their safety and/or refer these patients to an appropriate provider for screening, risk assessment, and treatment,” the Alert says.
The Alert points out that Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas became the first hospital in the United States to have universal screenings to determine whether patients are at risk for suicide. (For more information, see “Health system is thought to be first to provide universal suicide screenings” that ran in Healthcare Risk Management, also published by AHC Media, at bit.ly/1Rawpen.)
“Through preliminary screenings of 100,000 patients from its hospital and emergency department, and of more than 50,000 outpatient clinic patients, the hospital has found 1.8 percent of patients there to be at high suicide risk and up to 4.5 percent to be at moderate risk,” says the Alert, basing its figures on a report in The Dallas Morning News.1
The Alert aims to assist providers in better identifying and treating individuals with suicide ideation. The Alert also provides screening, risk assessment, safety, treatment, discharge, and follow-up care recommendations for at-risk individuals.
The Joint Commission is bringing attention to this issue because its Sentinel Event Database received 1,089 reports of suicides occurring from 2010 to 2014. The most common root causes documented were shortcomings in assessment, most commonly psychiatric assessment. In addition, 5.14% of Joint Commission-accredited hospitals, for which a related National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) was applicable, were non-compliant in 2014 with conducting a risk assessment that identifies specific patient characteristics and environmental features related to suicide risk. (For more on that NPSG, see the Same-Day Surgery article “New Patient Safety Goals added...