Syncing Screening and Services for Suicide Prevention across Health and Justice Systems

Grant Details

Title: Project 1: Syncing Screening and Services for Suicide Prevention across Health and Justice Systems

Funder: NIMH

Parent project number: 1P50MH127512

Sub-project ID: 8576

Project period: 08/22/2022 – 07/31/2027

Brief Narrative: This is a 5-year Signature Project within the NIMH-funded P50 Suicide Prevention Center, titled The National Center for Health and Justice Integration for Suicide Prevention. As suicide rates in the United States continue to rise, with nearly 50,000 suicide deaths and over 1 million suicide attempts annually per most recent data, increased attention has been paid to how to best integrate and coordinate suicide risk identification and prevention across multiple sectors, where some of our most vulnerable community members “fall through the cracks” in the continuum of care. Perhaps nowhere is this need for coordination and integration more pronounced than at the intersection of the US jail system, with over 10 million admissions per year, and the community healthcare system; an intercept known to impact individuals at disproportionately high risk for suicide. Given that roughly 10% of all suicides in the US with known circumstances occur following a recent criminal legal stressor (often arrest and jail detention), reducing suicide risk in the year after jail detention could have a noticeable impact on national suicide rates. There is thus a vital need to develop suicide risk care pathways between jails and healthcare systems to offer immediate access to care. Yet this process has been stymied by major fissures in the integration of data and clinical information between jails and health systems, preventing effective coordination of care between these community sectors. To address these needs, the proposed Signature Project is a Hybrid Type I effectiveness-implementation trial that harmonizes local jail booking and release data with healthcare records at two large healthcare systems in Minnesota and Michigan, to identify health system patients who are released from jail, and to pair the data linkage with randomization into usual care or a multi-level health system suicide prevention care pathway (consisting of care coordination, Safety Planning, Caring Contacts, and a telehealth delivered Coping Long- Term with Active Suicide Program). In so doing, this project leverages the study team’s experience in health system data linkage in the NIMH-funded Mental Health Research Network, from which the participating healthcare systems were chosen, as well as in suicide prevention around the period of jail detention and release (i.e., in the SPIRIT Trial), and in telephone-based suicide prevention intervention (i.e., in ED-SAFE). The proposed project will randomize 1050 individuals into the 5S intervention at both sites (comparing to more than 60,000 people in a usual care no contact comparison arm). Findings on suicide attempt and death outcomes, healthcare utilization mechanisms, cost- effectiveness, and implementation factors will provide data for a future fully scaled implementation trial and widespread adoption in community settings. Notably, the proposed Signature Project will be the first trial of a comprehensive health system intervention to prevent suicide in response to patients’ justice involvement.

  • Lead MHRN site: HFHS (PI: Brian Ahmedani)
  • Participating site: HPI (co-I: Rebecca Rossom)