This text is part of the special booklet 90th Acfas Congress
More than 1,000 people take their own lives each year in the province. Suicide prevention will be the theme of a symposium on May 12, at the Acfas Congress. We will look at the state of current knowledge on the effectiveness of different types of intervention in Quebec, but also in France and with certain populations with special needs.
A nurse by training, Jessica Rassy, now a professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke, understood in her practice that emergency services had to be adapted to better meet the needs of suicidal people who meet there to ask for help. It focuses primarily on general emergencies rather than psychiatric emergencies.
“Someone in immediate danger who comes to the emergency room does not always receive the same type of service from one hospital to another,” explains the researcher. Sometimes the person has a difficult experience that does not make them want to go back. Our work aims to improve the care and services received, in collaboration with the community. »
Because if a person is not in imminent danger, other resources may be more appropriate to help. “Some people end up in the emergency room because they have not been able to get help otherwise, regrets Mme Rassy. The goal is to send them to the right place. Some follow-ups can be done, for example, in a suicide prevention center or in a crisis centre. We must make these resources better known to the public and health professionals, and then facilitate their access. »
The researcher, who will give the conference “Prevention of suicide in the emergency room: How? Or ? When ? », developed with his team a clinical protocol of evaluation and accompaniment baptized SécUrgence.
“Collaborators from different regions also lent their shoulders to the wheel, such as psychologists, social workers, social workers, police officers, first responders, people who ended up in the emergency room for a suicidal risk or their loved ones. , she lists. We really wanted to have a global vision of the situation. »
The team is now carrying out a pilot project at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. “The protocol makes it possible to standardize the practice,” she explains. It targets the essential elements to ensure the health and safety of these people, but it can be modified according to the particular situation of the hospital. »
For example, some regions are better off than others in terms of the presence of community organizations. There are also online resources that can be used.
“Once we have the results of our pilot project, which should last a year or two, we will present them and then implement the protocol in other emergency rooms in Quebec,” says Jessica Rassy.
Bringing together expertise
The symposium will also present a conference by Charles-Edouard Notredame, child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University Hospital of Lille, who coordinates 3114, the national suicide prevention number in France.
The other speakers are part of the Papageno research team, specializing in suicide prevention, founded last year with funding obtained from the Fonds de recherche du Québec — Société culture.
The team leader, Marie-Claude Geoffroy, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, is in charge of the symposium. She will present the results of a literature review with meta-analysis that she carried out to estimate the prevalence of suicidal ideation in children aged 6 to 12 years.
“I looked in all the reported studies that touch on the problem of suicide in children to try to calculate what percentage of them have thought about it, explains the researcher. The studies come mainly from the United States, but some come from Canada. With this state of the situation, we will look at what this implies for prevention. »
Epidemiologist and developmental psychiatrist Camille Davisse-Paturet will talk about suicidal thoughts among young people from LGBTQ communities, who are particularly vulnerable.
“It is important to bring together all this expertise,” says Professor Geoffroy. Currently, the suicide rate is relatively stable in Quebec, but emergency room visits for suicide attempts are on the rise among young people, particularly girls, according to data from the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ ). We need to share knowledge and enhance our prevention efforts. »
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