From Pilot to Practice: Implementation of a Suicide Risk Screening Program in Hospitalized Medical Patients.

INTRODUCTION: Hospitals have become an important venue for identifying medical patients with occult suicidality. This article describes the implementation of a quality improvement project at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center (NIHCC) to systematically screen medical/surgical inpatients for suicide risk. METHODS: Using the Plan-Do-Study-Act method, questions from the Ask Suicide-Screening Questions (ASQ) tool were deployed with medical inpatients aged 10 years and older between April 2018 and April 2019. Goals included the development of a training program, policy and procedure review, electronic medical record integration and data collection, and ongoing management and troubleshooting. RESULTS: A total of 4,284 patients were screened for suicide risk with a nurse screening compliance rate of 94.3%. Prevalence data on patients aged 10 years and older revealed an overall screen positive rate of 2.3% (97/4,284), with 3.1% of youth aged 10 to 24 years and 2.2% of adults screening positive. Of the 97 patients who screened positive, 96 were non-acute positive screens. Of the full sample, only 1 patient (0.02%) was deemed acute positive, requiring a 1:1 observer and full safety precautions. CONCLUSION: Universal suicide risk screening was successfully implemented in the NIHCC without incurring a need for additional resources. The intermediate step of a brief suicide safety assessment is a critical part of the workflow, providing guidance for determining appropriate follow-up in a safe and efficient manner that spares limited mental health and hospital resources. Given the increasing suicide rates in the general population, medical venues offer important opportunities for early detection, assessment, and referral.

Use of a self-reported psychosocial distress screening tool as a predictor of need for psychosocial intervention in a general medical setting.

This study describes the development of a self-reported psychosocial distress screening tool for a general medical population and criteria to predict the need for psychosocial intervention. The objectives were to develop criteria to determine which patients need in-person screening and establish criteria identifying patients who are more likely to require psychosocial interventions. The outcomes have bearing on reducing initial psychosocial screening workload for medical social workers in high volume medical settings. Furthermore, a criterion for scoring the self-reported tool can predict which patients will need further social work intervention. The results suggest criteria are a score on the adapted Distress Thermometer of five or greater, at least two negative emotions, and a lack of health insurance. The optimal criterion identified 36% (446/1228) of patients in need of in-person screening with the remaining 64% (782/1228) screened low risk through the tool, representing a significant workload reduction.

Conducting HIV research in racial and ethnic minority communities: building a successful interdisciplinary research team.

HIV infection occurs in disproportionately high rates among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, making it imperative that individuals from these groups be included in research studies. However, it is often difficult to recruit HIV-infected Hispanics and African Americans in clinical trials, but a skilled interdisciplinary team that includes researchers with racial and ethnic diversity can help. This article describes a successful approach for building an interdisciplinary team that values the participation of racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials and has the skills to work with these groups. The success of the Adelante (a Spanish word meaning forward) Team can be attributed to team members who actively participate in decision-making, are empowered, and function in a cohesive manner. Successful research teams build relationships with research participants to increase the probability that racial and ethnic minorities will enroll and participate fully in research.