Patient Safety and Suicide Prevention in Mental Health Services

Course overview

This course is based upon material published in the Journal of Mental Health and is available as an open access article. Suicide is a major public health issue (WHO, 2014) with more than 800,000 people taking their own lives worldwide per year. This loss of life has devastating effects on families and friends and the persons wider network (Pitman, Osborn, King, & Erlangsen, 2014). Patients in contact with mental health services and those who present to hospital following self-harm are identified by national suicide prevention strategies as key target groups for reducing suicide rates (WHO, 2018). Despite decades of research into self-harm and suicide prevention, there are significant gaps between research, policy, and clinical practice. In this course, we discuss how adopting a patient safety paradigm can provide additional insights into suicidal behavior in mental health services and generate new opportunities for suicide prevention. This course on patient safety and suicide prevention is designed for social workers, professional counselors, psychologists, nurses, and substance abuse counselors, who do clinical work. This course is appropriate for beginning, intermediate and advanced level practitioners who wish to develop or increase their knowledge of suicide prevention. The course material includes a literature review of various paradigms for reducing patient harm. It may also be useful for licensed clinicians who require clinical continuing education courses for license renewal. Authors: Quinlivan, Littlewood, Webb & Kapur Learning Objectives: This course will provide the practitioner with detailed information regarding patient safety and suicide prevention. Specifically, a professional will: Recognize the incidence of suicide worldwide Summarize the three patient safety paradigms Explain how patient safety programs can generate new opportunities for suicide prevention Citation: Quinlivan, Littlewood, Webb & Kapur (2020) Patient safety and suicide prevention in mental health services: time for a new paradigm?, Journal of Mental Health, 29:1, 1-5, DOI: 10.1080/09638237.2020.1714013