University Health’s CoSPLAY (Comprehensive Suicide Prevention Blueprint for Adults and Youth) Program will implement a comprehensive public health approach to prevention with the aim to reduce suicide morbidity and mortality among youth, ages 10 – 24, especially in sexual and gender identity minorities. By employing community-based, healthcare-based, and upstream preventions, the CoSPLAY program seeks to address health disparities affecting youth in our community, who are disproportionally affected by suicide. CoSPLAY will focus of factors that influence social determinants of health, reduce risk factors, and increase protective factors for suicide risk. Population: The CoSPLAY Program will screen 50,000 youth, ages 10 to 24, including sexual and gender identity minorities, who are at-risk for suicide across 21 ambulatory clinics, including those being seen at Women and Children’s clinics, in five regional areas. Of those 50,000, it is estimated 6,000 will screen positive for suicidality. Interventions: Youth who screen positive for suicide risk will participate in a comprehensive suicide prevention approach based on community and healthcare-based interventions, and upstream prevention strategies. This approach will be guided by the short, medium, and long-term goals of the project. The community-based intervention that will be employed is to identify and support people at-risk by implementing gatekeeper trainings: Question Persuade, and Refer and Mental Health First AID in schools and school-based University Health clinics. CoSPLAY will also lesson harms and prevention future risk by communicating safe messaging. Healthcare-based interventions include expanding the current Zero Suicide model to strengthen access and delivery of care at University Health for youth, creating protective environments by providing counseling on access to lethal means, and conducting active follow-up approaches to support youth at-risk and prevent reattempts. Lastly
, the upstream prevention strategy that will be used by CoSPLAY will be to teach youth coping and problem-solving skills by employing social-emotional learning programs such as Youth Aware Mental Health Program (YAMH). Goals and Objectives: The primary goal of CoSPLAY is to reduce suicide attempts (morbidity) and deaths (mortality) in youth participating in CoSPLAY. Short-term goals: (1) Increase COSPLAY’s utilization of strategies from the technical package to address risk and protective factors among youth; and (2) increase CoSPLAY’s use of indicators and metrics to track impact of strategies in youth. Medium-term goals: (1) decrease risk factors and (2) increase protective factors among youth. Long-term goal: 10% reduction in suicide morbidity and mortality in youth, ages 10 – 24 years old.