Safer Still

NIH RePORTER · NIH · P50 · $200,455 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

The period immediately following inpatient psychiatric hospital discharge poses an extremely high risk of suicide. Among youth, roughly 20% of all suicide deaths occur in those who had an inpatient hospital stay in the year before death. This concentration of suicide risk should stimulate research on developing and evaluating strategies that protect young patients from suicide during this critical transition period. Unfortunately, well-established interventions for safe transitional care to prevent suicide do not exist. We propose to develop an interactive intervention “Safer Still” to help promote safe storage of firearms during the critical period immediately following psychiatric hospitalization. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents in the United States, and firearms are used in more than 40% of these deaths. Our innovative intervention entails no clinician involvement outside of routine care and is based on behavioral economics (BE), a model that features insights from psychology, economics, and marketing to enhance individual decision making. Through technology, we will implement a series of BE “nudges” to promote safe firearm storage in a sample of parents of adolescents at high risk for suicide who own firearms and have disclosed unsafe household storage practices. The aims of this hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation study will be achieved in two phases. First, guided by the PRISM (Practical, Robust, Implementation, and Sustainability Model) framework, the Safer Still intervention will be refined based on clinician and family feedback from key informant interviews and participant usability testing phases. We will use PRISM domains to increase our understanding of Safer Still implementation and sustainability. Second, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) will be conducted to test the effectiveness of Safer Still, while systematically collecting data related to the potential implementation in real-world settings. During the RCT, we will recruit 80 firearm-owning parents or guardians of adolescents aged 12-17 years living in households with unsafe firearm storage and randomly assign them to either the Safer Still intervention (n=40) or Enhanced Usual Care (EUC; n=40). Our central hypothesis is that Safer Still will be superior to EUC in reducing unsafe household firearm storage after hospital discharge. Our secondary aim is to examine clinician and family perspectives on the acceptability, feasibility, and appropriateness of Safer Still. We will also examine a potential mediator (stages of change) and two moderators (adolescent history of a suicide attempt and parental primary reason for firearm ownership) of intervention effects. Our investigative team offers an extensive track record in youth suicide prevention research, BE, mental health intervention research, lethal means restriction, culturally informed health services, and technology intervention development and deployment. Our project will be conducted t...

Key facts

NIH application ID
10893005
Project number
5P50MH127476-03
Recipient
RESEARCH INST NATIONWIDE CHILDREN'S HOSP
Principal Investigator
JEFFREY A BRIDGE
Activity code
P50
Funding institute
NIH
Fiscal year
2024
Award amount
$200,455
Award type
5
Project period
2022-08-01 → 2027-07-31