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Suicide Awareness Training Taught Anesthesia Teams to Recognize Colleagues at Risk
Overview
What was the reason for the change?
After a follow-up on a peer-to-peer encounter, it was surprisingly found out that a member of the team had transient suicidal thoughts that were not identified. Peer support training, which was conducted by an outside national organization did not address how to approach this topic or what to do if a team member disclosed suicidal thoughts.
What were we trying to accomplish?
Improve team member awareness and identification of team members’ identification of behavior concerning for suicidal ideation and their comfort level in proactively addressing this.
How will we know that a change is an improvement?
Subjective/qualitative interviews with team members regarding the value of training.
Implementation
How long did it take to get up and running?
4-6 months to get approval, secure funding, register training company as a vendor (so individuals would not have to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed, and complete training. The training module itself takes 60-90 minutes to complete and can be reviewed multiple times over the course of a year, when the license expires.
How was readiness assessed & required resources identified?
None specific – individuals could complete the course on either their own devices (computer/tablet/phone) or on hospital-owned devices.
What were the missteps and lessons learned along the way?
None that were identified.
Solution Design
What changes can we make that will result in an improvement?
Although this training could be provided in a live, synchronous session it would be challenging to allot non-clinical time to make it happen for a larger number of team members. We sought out online, self-paced learning opportunities.
What was your implementation strategy and critical steps?
- We found a source for an online, self-paced learning course that had been utilized for years, had research supporting it, and spoke to those who completed the course and vouched for it
- We had one member of our department complete the course and determine whether it would be suitable and reasonable for our team members to complete
- Approached hospital leadership with literature regarding suicide in anesthesia team members and provided a rationale for seeking funding for this as a pilot within our department that could serve as a model for other departments.
Adoption & Sustainability
How did you communicate the tactic to those affected by it?
Survey sent out to department members to register interest. Funded for 15 licenses initially and had 15 interested in participating.
How did you design for sustainability of the change?
Even though training could be completed at any time throughout the 1 year license period, we had those who were interested in training commit to completion within 3 months. We met as a group at the end of three months to discuss the training with a licensed clinical social worker from our hospital to address questions, and again 6 months later to ensure retention. We plan to meet biannually moving forward to ensure retention of skills learned.
- peer support
- second victim
- suicide
