BACKGROUND: Obtaining suicide-related surveillance data from systems that serve youth at higher suicide risk – including juvenile justice, child welfare, and public behavioral health systems – can allow for enhanced prevention planning, data-informed decision making, directed quality improvement, and, in some cases, assessment of program impact. However, there are few resources in the extant literature on understanding the nuances of collecting, analyzing, and utilizing suicide-related data from these systems, including commonalities in the type(s) of suicide-related data that may be collected and the method(s) of data collection in these systems, existing mechanisms for data sharing, and common data limitations. In response, the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC), funded through a cooperative agreement with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), conducted a project to document existing needs and opportunities among federal state suicide prevention grantees on accessing and utilizing suicide-related surveillance data from juvenile justice, child welfare, and public behavioral health systems.
METHODS: To identify needs and opportunities, three methods were used: (a) Using a semi-structured interview guide, we conducted key informant interviews with 9 state administrators from relevant youth-serving systems to explore how data related to suicide ideation, attempt, and death are collected, analyzed, used and shared; (b) Using an online survey of 22 current Garrett Lee Smith youth suicide prevention grantees, we explored access to juvenile justice, child welfare, and public behavioral health data, as well as relevant technical assistance needs; and (c) Using an archival review of interviews with suicide prevention teams, we identified examples of innovative data partnerships between suicide prevention and youth-serving state systems.
RESULTS: Suicide prevention providers seeking to use suicide-related data from juvenile justice, child welfare, and public behavioral health systems may experience the following: (a) Difficulties in establishing and/or interpreting trends due to a small number of events (i.e., in-system suicide deaths) and/or small overall size of in-system populations; (b) Challenges in data availability, stemming from system overreliance on narrative data; (c) Issues with cross-system sharing, including lack of institutionalized data sharing agreements, and privacy and safety concerns; and (d) Challenges related to data quality, including a lack of standardized definitions for suicide-related behaviors, and difficulty tracking youth cross-system and post-system involvement.
CONCLUSIONS: We will highlight SPRC’s resulting report, which offers success stories from the field, along with tips and resources on overcoming identified challenges.