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Abstract
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Suicide Prevention, Inc of St. Louis recently completed a statistical study aimed at evaluating all facets of our service. A special corps of volunteers, recruited for the purpose, coded records filed from January through June of 1970 on seventy-six different items taken from the record forms.
Along with other information was coded the name of the clinical associate (volunteer) who took each call. It was then possible to run a print-out on each clinical associate in order to examine with him his habitual methods of handling callers and, hopefully, to improve them. Furthermore, we thus had a record of who took the calls on every phase of the study.
It was on a print-out labeled AGE UNKNOWN that we discovered a very simple means of determining how thorough a volunteer is. It became apparent that when a volunteer fails to find out a subject's age, the whole level of information is low.
A subject's age is perhaps the easiest information to elicit. Therefore, it came as a shock to find out that out of 1089 calls presenting crisis situations (that is, eliminating hoaxes, administrative calls, etc.) no age was recorded in 134 instances. This constituted 13% of the total.
Some of this lack of information can be explained by the fact that attempts were higher in the AGE KNOWN group than in the 955 calls where age was recorded (16% versus 11.5%). At the time of an attempt the immediate need for medical attention takes precedence over everything else. The St. Louis Suicide Prevention, Inc. volunteers are trained in a priority of information-gathering. When someone has taken a bottle of pills, it is much more important to find out what he has taken, how long ago, in what quantity, etc., than how old he is. It is also more important to find out his name and address than why he felt so unhappy. What hospital is nearby? Who can take him there? Those practical considerations make the report of an attempt somewhat different from a non-attempt crisis call. However, we can give our AGE KNOWN calls only a 5.3% attempters' handicap. Number of attempts was not the one, big issue making a difference in the amount of information reported.
Language: en |