Suicide Intervention Training Suite for Healthcare Providers
Practice Interventions with a Virtual Role-Player to Develop or Refine Your Skills in a Risk-Free Environment
Only $175 for Annual License of Entire Suite
(group discounts available)
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress.
Dial 988 to reach 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Designed to Support Medical Institutions & Clinicians
Suicide Intervention Training
This training suite will build clinician skills in:
- Assessing patients
- Motivating them to treatment
- Developing safety plans
It includes educational materials & three role-plays with comprehensive feedback.
Practice Suicide Interventions
with Virtual Role-Players
- A mistake in practice has real consequences
- A mistake in a role-play provides a learning experience
Click here to read about ways people use our technology or watch the video below.
Build Skills to Effectively Assess Patients
Every person who experiences suicidal ideation is different. The first step in providing care to these patients is to understand their life and how it is being impacted by thoughts of suicide. Practice with Taye Banks will help build and sharpen assessment skills.
Meet Role-Player Taye Banks
Taye Banks is a fictional patient who identified that she is thinking of suicide in her pre-exam paperwork. Learners practice talking with Taye to find out about her life, her thoughts of suicide, what’s triggering them, and what’s preventing her from making an attempt. Each time a learner starts a new conversation, the simulation randomly selects a different combination of these factors to give providers experience assessing different patients. Following the virtual patient visit, learners practice documenting what they heard and identifying next steps. Feedback is provided on how well they connected with Taye and how much information they learned.
Watch Video
Build Skills to Motivate Patients to Seek Treatment
Not every patient who experiences thoughts of suicide is ready to receive treatment. Some who may be ready are limited by barriers such as cost, lack of time, or stigma. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a technique that can help providers guide a patient toward change by exploring both their reasons for and against change.
Meet Role-player Katrina Sanderson
Role-player Katrina Sanderson is considering seeking treatment for her thoughts of suicide. Learners practice talking with Katrina to discuss the option of therapy, gain an understanding of what her life would be like with and without treatment, and understand her motivations and barriers to seeking treatment. Following the conversation, learners receive feedback on how well they reflected Katrina’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions and how well they help her share reasons for wanting to change.
Build Skills to Develop Effective Safety Plans
A safety plan is a list of coping skills that an individual can use to keep themself safe when they start thinking about suicide. These plans can include everything from self-distraction to calling for professional help. High-quality safety plans reduce the likelihood of hospitalization for people thinking about suicide. Suicide Prevention: Safety Planning with Henry Douglas provides clinicians the opportunity to practice building quality, individualized safety plans.
Meet Role-Player Henry Douglas
Henry Douglas has been thinking about suicide a few times each week for six months. Learners practice helping this role-player create a safety plan that will work for him. Each time the conversation starts, the simulation will randomly select a list of coping strategies Henry will be willing to discuss and how effective they may be for him. Sometimes he will offer a lot of solutions that he doesn’t think will work, and other times he will only offer a few working strategies. Following the conversation, feedback is provided on how well the clinician supported Henry’s abilities to keep himself safe, explored the effectiveness of the safety plan, and explained how to use the safety plan.
SIMmersion's PeopleSim® Technology
During a conversation with one of the role-players, users select from a rich set of prompts. Each selected prompt typically has 5 to 15 available responses. The PeopleSim software calculates probabilities for each response and uses them to randomly choose one response. The calculations are based on one of the randomly selected role-player's personalities and the relationship the user has developed with the role-player. The relationship between the user and the role-player will evolve in a way that depends on what the user says. Click here to read more about SIMmersion’s PeopleSim Technology. Click here to watch a video about SIMmersion’s PeopleSim Technology.
Research
- Click here to see the research paper "Suicide risk assessment training using an online virtual patient simulation".
- Click here to see the list of SIMmersion publications.
Funding
This training was developed in collaboration with The Institute for Family Health and Education Development Center (EDC) with funding from The National Institutes of Health (Grant Number: #R44 MH114710). To read more about EDC's Zero Suicide Initiative visit: Zero Suicide EDC
Try or Purchase