The Suicide Assessment Tool
The suicide assessment tool was developed to help evaluate people at the risk of being suicidal. Experts developed it in the field of suicide assessment and development of scales and tools in clinical, research and institutional settings. However, the suicide assessment tool is not a diagnostic tool since suicide is not a medical diagnosis but a behaviour. It is also not a predictive tool since suicide cannot be predicted (Fazel and Wolf, 2017). I found it to be a semi-structured instrument that can be followed to ensure risk factors associated with suicide have been examined.
Before the development of the suicide assessment tool, assessment of suicide risk was done by the clinical judgement of the nurse in charge. Inexperienced staff were likely to have less confidence in making such sensitive judgements. Development of the risk assessment tool helped develop confidence in less experienced staff and supplement the clinical judgement of the experienced nurses (Desjardins, n.d.). Since then, it has helped clinicians detect who is at risk and who needs further intervention. In February 2016, the United States issued a sentinel event alert that all medical patients be assessed for suicide risks.
Before assessing the patient, I made sure I created a rapport to avoid receiving false information. It is regarded to be important with all the sensitiveness the assessment comes with. I also tried to engage the patient in a less professional but friendly way. However, due to my lack of experience, I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation in case the results turned positive. I was keen on the ‘golden rule’ of risk assessment that the evaluation should be thorough on every patient.
The suicide assessment tool has helped recognize many patients on the verge of attempting suicide. It has inarguably been a success since its development. However, assessing a patient through questions is not a clear way of assessment as you are not certain about receiving true information. It is difficult to know which patient answers correctly and which one answers wrongly. Some psychiatrists are hesitant on using the suicide assessment tool, worrying that risk stratification is too inaccurate to be useful (Oquendo and Bernanke, 2017). I find the suicide assessment tool more effective when it supplements the experience of experienced clinical staff.
References
Fazel, S. and Wolf, A. (2017, September) Suicide risk assessment tools do not perform worse than clinical judgement https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/suicide-risk-assessment-tools-do-not-perform-worse-than-clinical-judgement/6449F0BE2C8C9BC136691947F8B4795C
Oquendo, M. and Bernanke, A. (2017) Suicide risk assessment: tools and challenges https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5269494/
Desjardins, I., Baril, W., Maruti, S., Freeman, K., and Althoff, R. (2019) Suicide risk assessment in hospitals: an expert system-based triage tool https://www.psychiatrist.com/JCP/article/Pages/system-for-assessing-suicide-risk-in-hospitals.aspx