NUR 699 Evidence Based Practice Project

Suicide has reached an alarming stage globally and according to World Health Organization (WHO) it is most prominent in Eastern Europe and Asia. Lithuania has the highest suicide rates with 28.6 deaths per 100,000 people as per 2012 statistics. According to Global Health Observatory (GHO) (WHO) data, in 2015, there were 788,000 suicide deaths with standardized rate of 10.7 per 100,000 populations (Bertolote & Fleischmann, 2015). This shows that suicidal thoughts among people have increased and require assistance from medical professionals.

Every individual’s life has value and has some meaning. It also has huge influence on one’s family members and has an impact on the community as a whole. People suffering from depression or any kind of threat often get suicidal thoughts and they make calls to helpline for emotional support. However, little is known about the ideation of suicidal callers to telephone counselling agencies as the current practice.  Until recently, telecare nurses are being trained to manage suicidal callers through telephone triage. It helps to improve the short-term mental state of suicidal callers in reducing their intent and suicidal ideation where telecare management of depression and pain by telecare nurses can bring great reform in the healthcare system.

Issue

Suicidal calling is a nightmare for the telecare nurses as the callers have different mental status with worst scenarios. There are different levels of crisis where nurses have to deal with people who have varied suicidal thoughts. At times, victims might be alone and become unconscious before redialling or call become unreachable. Callers can even threat to kill or hurt themselves or be engaged in risky activities. These acts can turn out to be risky and take a heavy toll on one’s life. Moreover, suicidal callers are ambivalent towards death as if pain can be reduced slightly, the person can live again.

These warning signs show that suicide leaves a wide path for destruction and harms the callers and their loved ones. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death especially among young people. Surviving families also suffer from trauma of losing their loved ones and are at high risk for emotional and suicidal problems. This depicts that the issue of suicide is a major public health issue that requires attention and urgency to mitigate it. Suicidal callers make crisis calls to telecare organizations for counselling and emotional support. Therefore, telecare management need to train front-line staffers like telecare nurses so that they are able to manage suicidal callers or troubled veterans (Middleton, Gunn, Bassilios & Pirkis, 2014). Qualified professionals need specialized training to manage the crisis calls by suicidal callers. They would be able to know the signs and symptoms of the suicidal callers and extend a helping hand.

Stakeholders

Various stakeholders are involved for the specialized training of telecare nurses in the management of telecare nurses. Five key stakeholders are involved in this change training. They are the healthcare organization, telecare organization, nursing professionals, telecare nurses, educational provider (trainer) (Berge, 2016). In this, telecare nurses are the trainee who would be trained by the educational providers like psychologists (trainers) who are capable of understanding the mental health status of the suicidal callers. Nursing professionals comprises of the telecare professionals and researchers who have developed knowledge, skills and expertise to use technology for enabled care and well-being of suicidal callers who can train telecare nurses in managing crisis calls (Novoa, Silva & Torres, 2016). Telecare organizations need to inform the other stakeholders like nurse managers who would motivate nurses for the specialised training by demonstrating transformation leadership directed towards change. They will schedule the timeframe for the training, recruitment, training plan and miscellaneous (Hutchinson & Jackson, 2013).

Organizations

The healthcare organization and telecare management system as a whole can be benefitted by this practice change. There would be collaborative management of suicidal callers by telecare nurses that would be a reform in controlling suicides in the healthcare organization. Broadly, by introducing this change, the healthcare organization will be benefitted as the death rate due to suicides would lessen and reduction of healthcare costs would reduce by providing them remote service delivery. Families of the suicidal callers would be benefitted as it may be helpful to mitigate their suicidal thoughts and provide them a meaningful life. Most importantly, it would benefit and comfort the patients by assessing their emotional needs and providing them counselling to reduce their suicidal thoughts. Concisely, this change would benefit the complete healthcare sector and is considered a major reform (Moss, 2014).

Interested parties

Interested parties involve suicidal callers, their family members, counselling agencies, police department and youths (students). This specialized training would not only help the callers who are attempt to suicide, nut, also their family members by preventing suicide attempts and providing them an independent life. Counselling agencies, police squads and young students, (mainly youths) would also be benefitted as it would help to create awareness among them and prevent suicides by acting on it.

The purpose and objective of the project is that specialized training of the telecare nurses can help to manage suicidal callers as compared to the current practice.

The telecare nurses aim at addressing the high suicidal attempts and proper management of suicidal veterans through specialized training for a month. The project aims to manage the suicidal callers by providing specialized training to telecare nurses and bring about a change so that there is reduction in suicide attempts.

References

Berge, M. S. (2016). How Do We Understand Partnership Working? Experiences from a Telecare Project. Social Policy & Administration.

Bertolote, J. M., & Fleischmann, A. (2015). A global perspective in the epidemiology of suicide. Suicidologi, 7(2).

Hutchinson, M., & Jackson, D. (2013). Transformational leadership in nursing: towards a more critical interpretation. Nursing inquiry, 20(1), 11-22.

Middleton, A., Gunn, J., Bassilios, B., & Pirkis, J. (2014). Systematic review of research into frequent callers to crisis helplines. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 20(2), 89-98.

Moss, E. L. (2014, October). “Just a Telephone Call Away”: Transforming the Nursing Profession With Telecare and Telephone Nursing Triage. In Nursing forum (Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 233-239).

Novoa, L. B., Silva, P. R., & Torres, R. (2016). Local Telecare Service: The public-private collaboration in building a network of stakeholders. International Journal of Integrated Care, 16(6).