Journey Stories

The journey toward Zero Suicide begins with small improvements in practice.

Between April 2023 and April 2024, the Zero Suicide Institute partnered with The Pew Charitable Trusts to establish the Suicide Care Collaborative Outcome Improvement and Innovation Network (SC CoIIN). A CoIIN is a collaborative learning community that provides interdisciplinary teams with the skills and support needed to improve health outcomes. The SC CoIIN brought together seven teams comprised of healthcare workers and hospital administrators from organizations across the United States. All participating teams shared a common goal: to improve suicide care.

As a collective, the SC CoIIN demonstrated the power of collaboration to improve suicide prevention at scale. Individually, SC CoIIN teams made meaningful, measurable improvements to their own system’s suicide care.

Each journey story below provides insights on how to use key elements of the Zero Suicide approach in a healthcare setting. SC CoIIN participants interviewed for these stories discussed their extensive work to improve their healthcare system’s response to suicide, from building system-wide buy-in to revamping electronic health records. They shared how they adapted materials for their cultural context and how they improved their safety planning protocols. They commented on how bringing people with lived experience onto their team and using data to inform actions helped them achieve their goals.

Other healthcare professionals can use these stories in their own journeys toward Zero Suicide. Taken together, these stories reveal a roadmap for creating system-wide suicide prevention efforts that save lives.

Learn more about the methodology behind these Journey Stories:

• Methodology