Zero Suicide Initative and FETP
What is the Zero Suicide Initiative?
Zero Suicide is a national framework for delivering safer suicide care within health and behavioral health systems, maintained by the Education Development Center. It rests on the belief that suicide deaths among individuals under a system's care are preventable, and it is built on the recognition that people experiencing suicidal thoughts often fall through the cracks of a fragmented health care system. Research has shown that the large majority of people who died by suicide saw a health care provider in the year before their death — which means the opportunity to intervene is real and often missed.
Seven Elements of the Framework
The Zero Suicide framework operationalizes safer suicide care as seven elements. Lead establishes a system-wide commitment and a just culture that supports staff. Train builds a workforce that is competent, confident, and caring. Identify screens and assesses every client for suicide risk. Engage keeps at-risk clients in a care management plan, with collaborative safety planning and counseling on access to lethal means. Treat addresses suicidality directly using evidence-based interventions rather than treating it only as a symptom of another diagnosis. Transition supports clients through changes in care with warm handoffs and follow-up contact. Improve applies continuous quality improvement to the whole system. The elements work together — the evidence supports the framework as a whole, not as a menu of options.
At For Every Tomorrow Project, we are committed to each of the seven elements and have designed our clinical model with these tenets at the center.
In Practice
For Every Tomorrow Project has adopted Zero Suicide as our foundational clinical model. We are implementing all seven elements of the framework. Our board has formally committed to the goal of zero suicide deaths among individuals in our care. Every client is screened for suicide risk at intake and at every session thereafter, using validated tools. Clinicians are trained in suicide-specific assessment, safety planning, counseling on access to lethal means, and evidence-based treatment for suicidality. Administrative staff complete gatekeeper training, because a person in distress often reaches reception before they reach a clinician. When something goes wrong, we examine the system rather than assigning individual blame — and we measure our own fidelity to the framework on an ongoing basis.
Learn More about Zero Suicide
To learn more about the Zero Suicide Framework, visit the website at the link below.
The Zero Suicide framework was developed at Education Development Center (EDC) through the federally-funded Suicide Prevention Resource Center and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. The Zero Suicide Toolkit is administered by EDC and can be found at zerosuicide.edc.org.
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