A recent Pew Foundation survey of accredited hospitals found that only 4% met full criteria for implementing The Joint Commission’s recommended suicide prevention goals. One may wonder whether The Joint Commission’s suicide prevention recommendations were perhaps too expensive or burdensome for these hospitals to use? However, the exact opposite is true. Their recommendations are basic common sense suicide risk prevention approaches with supportive evidence, and are similar to recommendations issued by the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention (NAASP).

In 2018, the NAASP launched the “Standard Care Work Group” to develop and promote sensible recommendations for providers across outpatient, inpatient, emergency department, and primary care settings to use for effectively working with patients who are suicidal. The mission of this Work Group was to identify common sense interventions that have sufficient empirical support, would be relatively inexpensive, easy to implement, and would not require a great deal of training. The Work Group was made up of suicide prevention experts in policy (private and public sector), health care administration, and mental health care (and I was fortunate to serve as a member). The resulting document of our work was entitled, “Recommended Standard Care for People with Suicide Risk: MAKING HEALTH CARE SUICIDE SAFE” (NAASP, 2018).

Among the recommendations we promoted were: 1) routine and reliable identification and assessment of suicidal risk as a critical first step; 2) safety planning, which has become a crucial intervention for acute risk with considerable empirical support (Nuij et al., 2021); 3) identifying and reducing access to lethal means for suicide (e.g., securing a firearm or a stash of pills); and 4) brief caring communications made after clinical contact in the form of a letter, phone call, text, or postcards which are referred to as “caring contacts” and are known........

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