Research to Optimize the Effectiveness and Deployment of Suicide Prevention Services

Presenter

Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.
Division of Services and Intervention Research

Goal

This concept aims to support research to identify, optimize, and test solutions to enhance the effectiveness, quality, and availability of U.S. suicide prevention services.

Rationale

Research has yielded evidence-based suicide prevention strategies and tools for screening, risk stratification, and interventions and services to reduce suicide risk. Yet, the lack of scalable approaches for training, supervising, and monitoring the quality of delivery by clinicians, peer specialists and other paraprofessional providers leaves many providers feeling ill-equipped to serve some of their most vulnerable service users, and limits overall access to effective, evidence-based suicide prevention. The significant behavioral health service provider shortage affecting more than a third of the U.S. population compounds the problem. This further underscores the need for a more robust, complementary, and well-trained provider base, including sustainable strategies for integrating and expanding the number of effective peer support specialists and paraprofessionals into clinical and community practice settings.

The proposed concept would foster research that tests solutions to improve the effectiveness, quality, and availability of suicide prevention services. One area of emphasis would be to support studies focused on optimizing and testing provider training strategies and quality monitoring tools to promote competence and sustained implementation fidelity in delivering evidence-based suicide prevention interventions and services. Examples could include studies testing research-supported provider-level training and supervision strategies, validating scalable measures and tools for monitoring delivery and outcomes of suicide prevention services, and/or examining novel technologies to support training and real-time monitoring of intervention delivery and quality. Additionally, the concept encourages research developing and testing strategies to augment clinical services through scalable and sustainable peer support interventions that complement and extend services for suicide prevention in clinical and community settings. Studies are encouraged that examine task sharing models that propose and test clear roles for Peer Support Specialists (PSP) and incorporate scalable and sustainable approaches to training and supervision, safety monitoring, and credentialing to complement and extend the behavioral health workforce. PSP strategies should be based upon relevant conceptual frameworks that inform provider roles, duties, and factors presumed to underlie the intervention effects. Models could be tested across clinical and community practice settings, including the crisis care continuum and within stepped care protocols. Models should be informed by those involved in intervention models of behavioral health services, including service users and others with lived experience, providers, and administrators who make decisions about adoption, credentialing, and reimbursement. Studies could also leverage data from health records or other administrative data sources to evaluate innovative approaches to deploying peer support services, including approaches that involve telehealth and innovative reimbursement policies.