Journal Club May 2017 - Suicide Risk Assessment

Journal Club May 2017 - Suicide Risk Assessment

Emergency physicians regularly see psychiatric patients who are having suicidal thoughts or engage in non-suicidal self-injurious (NSSI) behavior. In addition to working these patients up medically, it is part of our job to determine who needs emergent evaluation by a psychiatric provider and who is safe for discharge. This is a very important decision, as we do not want to send high risk patients home and keep low risk patients for extended periods of time while they await their evaluation. Balancing this can be difficult - oftentimes it is not obvious where a patient falls on this spectrum. We are taught various decision aids in medical school to help us risk stratify these patients - but how do they perform on emergency department patients? For this month's journal club, we looked at three papers that examine three different decision aids to help elucidate this issue.

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