I have been working as a registered nurse in the ambulance service since 2008 and in 2010 I examined as a specialist nurse. Since the beginning of 2019 I am a doctoral student in caring science at the department of Health and Caring Sciences at Linnaeus University. The studies are being conducted in 50% and the remaining 50% I am working clinically in the ambulance service in Region Sörmland.
Research
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 whom 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 and 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 meeting 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 meeting between ambulance care and patients in a suicidal process two interview studies will be conducted, 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. Further studies will describe causes of contact with ambulance care up to a year before suicide and finally 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.