High-Risk Management Guidelines for Elderly Suicidal Patients in Primary Care Settings

In 1993, the Agency for Health Care Policy & Research (AHCPR) released clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of depression in primary care settings. The AHCPR guidelines offered some assistance with respect to detecting & treating patients who are suicidal, but lacked detailed & specific instructions for managing high-risk patients within the context of intervention research. The current set of guidelines builds upon this previous work by describing a general approach for interacting with suicidal patients, structured assessments for determining the degree of risk for suicide, crisis intervention strategies, & ongoing management procedures for working with suicidal patients in primary care settings. (26 refs)