Response-Suicide Screening in General Hospitals

摘要

Ryan and Large suggest that screening medically ill patients for suicide risk, described in Ask Suicide-Screening Questions to Everyone in Medical Settings: The asQ'em Quality Improvement Project, "border[s] on the grotesque." We disagree. Suicide is a rising international public health problem and medically ill patients, in particular, are at elevated risk.3 Suicidal thoughts and behaviors in these high-risk populations are under-detected and therefore under-treated. In our opinion, screening is far from "misguided."This project was judged by the National Institutes of Health's Office of Human Subjects Research Protections as exempt from Institutional Review Board review because it was a quality improvement project implemented in response to the Joint Commission (JC) Sentinel Event Alert of 2010.