Focus on patient safety - " Suicide Prevention is better than death "

Objectives

By sharing the feedback from healthcare professionals confronted with these care-related serious adverse event, this focus can be used:

• to alert healthcare professionals and care teams as to the occurrence of care-related serious adverse event which could have been avoided by assessing the suicide risk.
• to raise awareness among healthcare professionals as to prevention of suicide in patients.
• to help reduce the risk of errors related to management of suicidal patients.
• to reinforce information and training of healthcare staff as to good practices for assessing and managing suicide patients.

So it doesn’t happen again

Analysis of the care-related serious adverse event reveals several main root causes to these events: lack of secure areas, heavy workload and lack of training of healthcare professionals in psychiatry and mental health, lack of organisation in the department and communication between the teams.

To help prevent and manage patients at risk of suicide:

• Always remember to screen for suicide risk.
• Remember to detect mood disorders.
• Remember to inform about existing support schemes (examples: VigilanS, SOS Amitié France etc.).
• Do not forget postvention.