St. Joseph’s recognized for its work on the Zero Suicide initiative

The portion of the news release below was originally published on the HealthCareCAN website.

Patients and health leaders are uniting to reduce suicide and improve quality of mental health care.

Two important new mental health initiatives, developed by teams from St. Joseph’s Health Care London and Eastern Health in Newfoundland and Labrador, in partnership with patients and families, will be featured as leading practices at the National Health Leadership Conference (NHLC) on June 11 in Toronto. Both teams showed tremendous leadership and exemplary patient engagement in the redesign of care and service to reduce or eliminate suicides in patients receiving mental health care.

Excellence in Patient Engagement for Patient Safety Recognition Program

This recognition comes as part of the Excellence in Patient Engagement for Patient Safety Recognition Program, developed in partnership by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI), HealthCareCAN (HCC) and Health Standards Organization (HSO) with support from Patients for Patient Safety Canada.   This Recognition Program identifies, celebrates and spreads leading practices in patient engagement for patient safety.

Eastern Health will be recognized for the work its teams did to redesign its mental health and addictions service on the Burin Peninsula, to be a recovery-focused, walk-in service. As a result of the collaborative redesign efforts, wait lists have been largely eliminated and no lives have been lost to suicide since 2017.

Zero Suicide initiative

St. Joseph’s Health Care London will be recognized for its work on the Zero Suicide initiative, an ongoing implementation of screening, assessment, risk and safety planning processes that aims to prevent all suicides for those receiving mental health care within the health system.

The two teams have been invited to NHLC, Canada’s largest gathering of healthcare leaders, to present their leading practices. As part of the recognition program, HCC, HSO and CPSI will cover all travel expenses and full registration to the conference for one patient partner and one health leader from each team, so they can share their successes, experiences and lessons learned with health leaders across Canada.

Read the full release on the HealthCareCAN website.