Public Health Professionals Can Help Curb Rising Suicide Rates
Suicide is a sad and often difficult topic. But as suicide rates rise significantly in the United States, are public health workers ready to address the problem?
When health departments and universities join together, public health students can gain on-the-job training. Dozens of such academic health departments exist in states around the country.
Photo by Alvarez, courtesy iStockphoto.
Public health leaders are asking that question and looking to resources to better prepare workers and communities in light of research showing growing suicide rates.
Almost 45 000 people died by suicide in 2016, the most recent year with complete data, according to a June Vital Signs report in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Research in the report showed that suicide rates have increased by more than 30% in half of states since 1999.
Because suicide is often an acute risk—meaning someone who is considering suicide or who has attempted suicide needs immediate help from health professionals—people at the highest risk are seen in emergency department settings. But detecting risk much earlier, before people are in crisis, would be a more efficient way for health workers to help reduce suicides, said Jane Pearson, PhD, chair of the National Institute of Mental Health Suicide Research Consortium.
Current suicide prevention efforts focus mostly on identifying and providing treatment for people with mental health conditions. But a June study in AJPH found that only 20% of states have laws mandating that health care professionals complete suicide prevention training, and just 14% have policies encouraging such training.
The gap is especially notable because both a former surgeon general and suicide prevention organizations have called for training all health professionals and for incorporating suicide prevention competencies in undergraduate and graduate health professional education.
Public health workers could be the key for preventing suicides. Pearson noted that comprehensive preventive care, such as efforts to curb behavioral health risks, could be used in health care settings, schools, and community organizations to address risk and reduce deaths.
—Lindsey Wahowiak
To read the full story, visit http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/48/6/1.1.
Academic Health Department Partnerships Boost Training
Every year, more than 200 college students rotate through Tennessee’s Knox County Health Department, many of them future health workers hoping to put their classroom learning into practice.
Their experiences are thanks to an agreement with the University of Tennessee Department of Public Health, which is known as an academic health department—an arrangement between health departments and academic institutions focused on enhancing public health education, research, and services. The Tennessee collaboration is a 2-way street: students get to experience the daily workings of a real health department, and staff from the health department lecture at the university and offer guidance to ensure that the public health curriculum is graduating students ready to practice.
Although the Knox County Health Department is the first academic health department in Tennessee, it is one of dozens across the country and follows a long tradition of public health–academia partnerships. There are more than 60 academic health departments “that we’re aware of, but we think the actual number is larger,” said Ron Bialek, MPP, president of the Public Health Foundation, which staffs and facilitates the Academic Health Department Learning Community, the first such forum of its kind.
American Public Health Association member C. William Keck, MD, MPH, chair of the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice, of which the learning community is an initiative, said that in many ways, the academic health department is the public health equivalent of the teaching hospital for medical students.
—Kim Krisberg
To read the full story, visit http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/48/6/1.2.