TP16 - The Story of a Quality Improvement Project: Applying Multi-Method Strategies to Advance and Evaluate Suicide Safety in Behavioral Health Care

Suicide is a tragedy for individuals, their friends and families; represents a risk to those providing behavioral health care; and has become a national scourge among some populations. Importantly, it is almost always preventable. Our organization carried out a multi-method, multi-year, quality improvement project on Suicide Safe Care that offers lessons and a model for how to conduct successful, large-scale quality improvement (QI) projects in behavioral healthcare organizations. The approach was recently recognized by our lead Joint Commission Accreditor as (paraphrasing) “being the most thorough and well run corporate QI project she’d seen.” Here, we share data that reflects both the formative evaluation process and project outcomes, including staff trainings, implementation and sustainment of standardized screenings/assessments across levels of care and varied types of behavioral health programming, implementation and refinement of the use of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Alerts for clinical risk monitoring, the occurrence of suicide and self-harm related incidents over time; and the development of quality assurance protocols and a data dashboard that enables the continuous monitoring of key indicators of Suicide Safe Care. All aspects were critical to the initiative’s development and eventual success and can serve as a model to organizational quality improvement projects in general, including key takeaways for the audience to implement in their organization.