Telephone Assessment of Suicidal Risk at Prehospital Emergency Medical Services: A Direct Comparison with Face-to-Face Evaluation at Psychiatric Emergency Service

Abstract

Objective Assessment of suicidal risk is one of the most challenging tasks faced by health professionals, notably in emergency care. We compared telephone suicide risk assessment at prehospital Emergency Medical Services Dispatch Center (EMS-DC), with subsequent face-to-face evaluation at Psychiatric Emergency Service (PES), using French national Risk-Urgency-Danger standards (RUD). Method Data were collected for all suicidal adult patients (N = 80) who were addressed by EMS-DC to PES between December 2018 and August 2019 and benefited from RUD assessment at both services. Suicidal risk was given a score of 1, 2, 3 or 4, in order of severity. Results Mean of the differences between the RUD score at EMS-DC and PES was −0.825 (SD = 1.19), and was found to be significant (p < 0.01). The average time between RUD assessments was 420 min (SD = 448) and was negatively correlated with the difference in the RUD score (r = −0.295, p = 0.008). Associated suicide attempt increased the odds of a decrease in the RUD score (OR = 2.989; 95% CI = 1.141–8.069; p < 0.05). Conclusions Telephone evaluation of suicidal risk using RUD at EMS-DC yielded moderately higher scores than those obtained by a subsequent face-to face evaluation at PES, with this difference partially explained by the time between assessments, and by clinical and contextual factors.