The encounter between ambulance care and patients in a suicidal process regarding causes of contact, documentation and conversations

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.

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.