During this time of successful spread, project resources remained similar, no new or additional financial support was provided, and no new leadership directives had been communicated. The only new features of Perfect Depression Care spread were a 1-page practice guideline and a promise. Making suicide an explicit target of the intervention, and doing so in a ruthlessly practical way, created the conditions for the intervention to diffuse and be adopted more readily.
Spread to General Hospitals
In 2006, the Joint Commission established National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) 15.01.01 for hospitals and health care facilities “to identify patients at risk for suicide” [14]. NPSG 15.01.01 applies not just to patients in psychiatric hospitals, but to all patients “being treated for emotional or behavioral disorders in general hospitals,” including emergency departments. As a measure of safety, suicide is the second most common sentinel event among hospitalized patients—only wrong-site surgery occurs more often. And when a suicide does take place in a hospital, the impact on patients, families, health care workers, and administrators is profound.
Still, completed suicide among hospitalized patients is statistically a very rare event. As a result, general hospitals find it challenging to meet the expectations set forth in NPSG 15.01.01, which seemingly asks hospitals to search for a needle in a haystack. Is it really valuable to ask a patient about suicide when that patient is a 16-year-old teenager who presented to the emergency department for minor scrapes and bruises sustained while skateboarding? Should all patients with “do not resuscitate” orders receive a mandatory, comprehensive suicide risk assessment? In 2010, general hospitals in our organization enlisted our Perfect Depression Care team to help them develop a meaningful approach to NPSG 15.01.01, and so Perfect Depression Care spread to general hospitals began.
The goal of NPSG 15.01.01 is “to identify patients at risk for suicide.” To accomplish this goal, hospital care teams need simple, efficient, evidence-based tools for identifying such patients and responding appropriately to the identified risk. In a general hospital setting, implementing targeted suicide risk assessments is simply not feasible. Assessing every single hospitalized patient for suicide risk seems clinically unnecessary, if not wasteful, and yet the processes needed to identify reliably which patients ought to be assessed end up taking far longer than simply screening everybody. With these considerations in mind, our Perfect Depression Care team took a different approach.
The DAPS Tool
We developed a simple and easy tool to screen, not for suicide risk specifically, but for common psychiatric conditions associated with increased risk of suicide. The Depression, Anxiety, Polysubstance Use, and Suicide screen (DAPS) [15] consists of 7 questions coming from 5 individual evidence-based screening measures: the PHQ-2 for depression, the GAD-2 for anxiety, question 9 from the PHQ-9 for suicidal ideation, the SASQ for problem alcohol use, and a single drug use question for substance use. Each of these questionnaires has been validated as a sensitive screening measure for the psychiatric condition of interest (eg, major depression, generalized anxiety, current problem drinking). Some of them have been validated specifically in general medical settings or among general medical patient populations. Moreover, each questionnaire is valid whether clinician-administered or self-completed. Some have also been validated in languages other than English.