How do you engage a person when making a safety plan?
📰 Newsletter
A recent study (O’Connnor et al., 2024) explored what makes safety planning interventions effective by analysing existing qualitative peer-reviewed evidence of stakeholder experience.
Key Findings:
- Consumers, support persons, and clinicians find safety planning helpful, providing support for evidence that it reduces suicidal thoughts and behaviours.
- Person-centred safety planning helps by giving people more control over their care, strengthening hope by highlighting reasons for living, and building connections with support networks. It also helps individuals recognise distress early and use coping strategies.
- A collaborative, person-centred approach to safety planning helps individuals feel supported and involved in decisions about their care, strengthening their connection with others and their ability to cope.
- People may struggle to develop safety plans or use coping strategies when in crisis. When this happens, clinicians, consumers, and supports can focus on making environments safer and increasing lethal means safety until more robust plans can be developed.
- While clinicians recognise the importance of safety planning, time constraints and organisational barriers can limit its use. These challenges must not reduce this important intervention to a tick-box exercise rather than a meaningful support tool.
- Despite clear quantitative evidence that safety planning can contribute to decreased suicide ideation and behaviour, this study found that consumers and clinicians voiced doubt about the effectiveness of this tool. There is a need to talk with colleagues and consumers about how safety planning can be helpful when approached from a collaborative, person-centred perspective.
This formulation might be helpful when engaging consumers in safety planning:
- “I’d like to work with you to make some plans that you can rely on when you’re thinking about suicide or even just when things feel hard. These plans can help people feel more prepared to know what to do when they’re feeling unwell or unsafe.”
An additional strategy you can use is skipping the language of “safety planning”. Use the vocabulary that works for the person. They might prefer:
- Plan for When the Nightmares Get Worse
- Plan for the Worst Days
- Plan for When I feel X.
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