Ask Suicide-Screening Questions to Everyone in Medical Settings (asQ em): Development of a Suicide Risk Screening Instrument for Adult Medical Inpatients

In 2010, the Joint Commission (JC) issued a Sentinel Event Alert highlighting the need to detect suicide risk in all non-behavioral patients in medical settings. Detecting suicide risk among medical patients is important because this population is at elevated risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and because for many of these patients, a medical visit is their only portal into mental health services. Of note, the vast majority of people who die by suicide visit a medical setting, such as an inpatient oncology unit, more frequently than a psychiatric setting in the months leading up to their death. Thus, the inpatient medical setting is an important stakeholder in decreasing suicide-related morbidity and mortality. Physicians and nurses working in non-mental health settings require tools to guide them in recognizing patients at risk. Nonetheless, there are currently no suicide screening instruments designed specifically for assessing suicide risk in an adult inpatient medical population.

In 2012, our study team conducted a Quality Improvement Project (QIP) at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center (NIH CC) which demonstrated that the asQ em (Ask Suicide-Screening Questions to Everyone in Medical Settings), a brief instrument piloted to detect suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adult medical inpatients, was both feasible to administer and acceptable to both patients and staff. Extending this work, the aim of this current study is to further develop and psychometrically validate the asQ em among adult medical inpatients. While most inpatients will not be at imminent risk for suicide, we hypothesize that the asQ em will identify a number of patients who screen positive for suicide risk on a longer gold standard instrument, and that they are thus not only at risk for suicidal behavior in the future, but are also experiencing significant emotional distress and therefore warrant further mental health evaluation and recommendations for follow-up treatment.

This study will be a prospective, cross-sectional multisite study with patients enrolled from the NIH CC, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Rhode Island Hospital, and John Peter SmithHospital. The total planned sample size will be 810 (180 from WRNMMC, 180 from RIH, 200 from JPS, and 250 from NIH CC). We will administer several short measures of suicide risk: the 20 asQ em candidate items; a criterion standard Adult Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire (ASIQ); two questions which assess for suicidal behavior from a second criterion standard, the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation (BSI); a brief depression screen, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9); and an exploratory variable questionnaire, to all eligible inpatients aged 18 years and older. The ultimate goal of this project is the development of a validated risk of suicide screening instrument that can be administered rapidly by non-mental health clinicians to medical inpatients and in turn, connecting those in need with mental health services. Additionally, we hope to pilot the Suicide Implicit Association Test (S-IAT) in a subsample of recruited patients. The S-IAT is a brief computer task which measures a person s implicit association between self and either life or death . We expect to demonstrate that the S-IAT is feasible to administer in the inpatient medical setting thereby providing a potential alternative to self-report questionnaires for assessing patients thoughts about death or suicide.

Future studies will focus on examining the practical implications of nurses administering the asQ em as standard of care during the admission process on a medical inpatient unit and validating the asQ em in non-English speaking patients, addressing a critical gap in suicide prevention research. In addition, examining the long-term clinical impact of screening general medical patients for suicide risk with the asQ em and linking those in need with mental health services and/or other interventions will be important next steps.