National Center for Healthcare Advancement and Partnerships
VHA Community Partnership Challenge
Award-winning community partnership develops model for suicide prevention
When it comes to helping Veterans, one winning partnership is continuing to grow.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Patient Safety Center of Inquiry—Suicide Prevention Collaborative (PSCI-SPC) in Aurora, Colorado, was one of three winners of the annual Veterans Health Administration (VHA) National Community Partnership Challenge (CPC) in 2021, when the theme was “Adaptability in a Changing World.” PSCI-SPC won for helping partner organizations—like housing providers, fire and police departments, and libraries—build their own Veteran suicide prevention programs, and for offering a psychotherapy program for Veterans who may not be eligible for VA services.
Nearly a year later, the collaboration continues to be a stellar example of the power of partnerships to support Veterans’ opportunities to live their best, healthiest lives.
Dr. Bryann DeBeer, director of PSCI-SPC, said the collaborative has developed a new Veteran’s suicide prevention learning collaborative model, wherein her team teaches community agencies who interact with Veterans to develop internal suicide prevention programs. The team is now piloting this model in a second learning collaborative and focusing on VA Community Care, in which VA provides care to Veterans through community providers when VA providing care in the community is the best option for the Veteran and the health care system.
“We’ve noticed that a lot of our community agencies don’t have the proper training in order to care for Veterans and manage mental health and suicide risk, particularly in settings that are not mental health settings,” Dr. DeBeer explained. The group applied for and received funding to pilot the model with agencies that are in the VA Community Care network.
To develop its own models, PSCI-SPC considered various suicide prevention programs, such as VA, Department of Defense, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Zero Suicide programs. The group then developed best practices from those into a toolkit and what they call a “blueprint” for organizations to use.
PSCI-SPC has distributed more than 6,000 promotional materials related to Veteran mental health or suicide prevention and has found that the overall collaboration has reached more than 23,000 individuals.
Dr. DeBeer said that Veteran feedback about PSCI-SPC’s work speaks for itself—Veterans enrolled in the psychotherapy program have said that therapists were “the first person to not make me feel like a burden,” and that they would recommend the program to anyone they know.
“We’re getting a lot of really strong results and we’re working to publish all this research now,” she said.
The purpose of the CPC is to spread best practices across the health care system and encourage ongoing and new partnership work. Other partnerships throughout the country turned to PSCI-SPC—and other winners from last year and previous years—for inspiration when submitting their own partnerships to this year’s CPC, the theme of which is “G.R.O.W.” The 2022 VHA CPC submission period ended in March, and the awards ceremony will take place in August.
The G.R.O.W. theme submission had to answer the following questions: How do these partnerships show a Goal-oriented approach to collaborations? How do they build Resiliency across social determinants of health? How do they create Opportunities to increase access to care or services through an innovative approach? And how do they improve the Well-being of Veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors? Submissions also had to demonstrate how VHA staff and community organizations successfully partner to meet Veterans’ needs and honor a foundation of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA).
For more information on the CPC, which is managed by VHA’s National Center for Healthcare Advancement and Partnerships, visit: va.gov/healthpartnerships.
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Posted May 13, 2022
