Expanding Veteran suicide prevention: The role of community engagement and partnership coordinators

Abstract: Veteran suicide is a public health crisis. Suicide rates for U.S. veterans have remained disproportionately higher than their nonveteran counterparts during the last 2 decades (White House, 2023; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, Community-Based Interventions for Suicide Prevention, 2022). Additionally, the majority of veterans who die by suicide are not engaged in care from the Veterans Health Administration (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, 2023). Veterans Health Administration's Suicide Prevention 2.0 (SP 2.0) was developed to address this problem through a combination of clinical and community-based efforts that form a comprehensive public health approach for veteran SP (Carroll et al., 2020). In this article, the authors briefly outline the national, regional, and local program development of VA's Community-Based Interventions for SP within SP 2.0. Then, they describe local-level program development and implementation of the Community Engagement and Partnership Coordinators. Community Engagement and Partnership Coordinators are tasked with developing and facilitating coalitions with local agencies and organizations aimed at reducing suicide risk among service members, veterans, and their families. The authors review the implementation of this program from 2020 to 2024 and then suggest directions for future program evaluation and research on the impact of this approach in preventing veteran suicide.

Read the full article
Report a problem with this article

Related articles

  • More for Policy & Practice

    Temporal trends in opioid-related care and pain among Veterans at the end of life

    Abstract: Context: In response to the opioid crisis, federal guidelines were implemented, including the Veterans Health Administration's (VA) Opioid Safety Initiative in 2013. The impact of policies on patients near the end of life is unknown. Objective: Examine temporal trends in opioid prescribing, pain, and opioid overdoses among Veterans near the end of life. Methods: Retrospective, time series analysis of VA decedents between October 2009 and September 2018 whose next-of-kin participated in VA's Bereaved Family Survey (BFS). Using multivariate regression to adjust for sociodemographic and clinical covariates, we examined temporal trends in outpatient opioid prescribing, uncontrolled pain based on BFS report, and opioid overdose-related hospitalizations, in the last month of life, overall and by clinical diagnosis (cancer versus non-cancer). Results: Among 79,409 decedents, mean daily outpatient opioid dose in morphine milligram equivalents in the last month of life decreased from 4.6 mg in 2010 to 2.1 mg in 2018 (adjusted change -0.20 mg/year; P