Suicide Prevention in an In-Patient Setting
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Abstract
Record ID: 112
Program Affiliation: Capstone
Presentation Type: Poster
Abstract: Inpatient suicide remains a pressing concern within inpatient healthcare settings, necessitating effective prevention strategies and posing many challenges. This project aims to educate and train nursing staff on the interventions that should be implemented to prevent suicide in the inpatient population. Our main goal is to discover whether suicidal ideation patients in an inpatient setting, with more vigorous monitoring via sitter, lead to less risk of self-harm attempts during hospitalization. We created an education plan to present to a group of nine medical-surgical nurses at the VA Hospital. It included a presentation on close proximity monitoring, proper communication, effective handoff, and a pretest and post-test to assess their knowledge. The presentation emphasized relevant statistics, appropriate interventions, self-harm risk factors, and staff education specifically for patients with suicidal ideation. We examined the nurses on the pretest questions to gauge initial knowledge, then presented our topic to educate further. Following the presentation, the nurses completed the post-test. Two of the nurses got two out of the four questions right, five got three out of four questions right, and two got every question right on the pretest. Seven nurses got all the questions right on the post-test, and two got three out of the four. The nurses were engaged throughout the presentation and stated they believed these interventions would be helpful in their nursing practice to promote patient safety.