Doctoral project: Encountering suicidality in ambulance care

Project information

Doctoral student
Staffan Hammarbäck
Supervisor
Anders Bremer
Assistant supervisor
Mats Holmberg, Lena Wiklund Gustin
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University
Financier
Region Sörmland
Timetable
2019–2026
Subject
Caring Science (Department of Health and Caring sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences)

More about the project

Before suicide and suicide attempts, most people come in contact with the healthcare system and they show great ambivalence, meaning that there are numerous occasions for people who come in contact with the patient to interfere and prevent suicide. Ambulance care traditionally have a distinct medical perspective on the patient with focus on severe somatic disease and previous research have shown that mental illness can be considered as secondary or even obstructing from what is considered as legit assignments. An approach that reduces the patient to merely physiology runs the risk of letting patients with suicidal ideation pass through the system without the potentially lifesaving conversation about suicidality. Today there is lack of research in the area of the encounter between ambulance care and patients in a suicidal process. The context of ambulance care often presents a unique opportunity for the clinicians to focus on one single patient and to take part in the patient’s narrative and these elements are assumed to prerequisite a caring conversation about suicidality.

The primary purpose of the project is to describe the encounter between patients in a suicidal process and ambulance care regarding causes of contact, documentation and conversations.

To describe the encounter between ambulance care and patients in a suicidal process two interview studies are included, one that aims to describe ambulance clinicians conception of their responsibility in the meeting with patients in a suicidal process and one study that aims to illuminate patient’s lived experience of the meeting with ambulance care whilst being in a suicidal process. A third study describes causes of contact with ambulance care up to a year before suicide and the fourth study is a medical record analysis with focus on documentation of mental illness and suicidality of the patients whom came in contact with ambulance care within three months prior to suicide.