Improvements in Social Work Students' Comfort and Confidence Following a Virtual Suicide Prevention Training

Background and Purpose: Suicide is a serious and costly public health issue that is widely considered to be preventable with effective intervention. Most graduate social work programs offer only limited training on suicide prevention. The purpose of this study was to explore whether a one-day virtual training on suicide prevention impacted Master’s of Social Work (MSW) students’ attitudes towards suicide, their self-reported confidence and comfort in suicide risk assessment and prevention, and their beliefs about their role in suicide prevention.

Methods: Participants were 20 MSW students in a virtual interdisciplinary seminar on suicide prevention in the Fall of 2020. All attendees received pre-training materials and attended a didactic seminar. Then, MSW students engaged in small group role plays to practice suicide screening and risk assessment. Study participants completed pre- and post-test assessments using the Attitudes to Suicide Preventions scale (ASP) and additional questions measuring their self-reported comfort and confidence with suicide risk assessment and their beliefs about their role in suicide prevention. Paired-samples t-tests were conducted to determine statistically significant changes between pre- and post-test assessments. Data were managed and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 27. The study was approved by the overseeing University’s Institutional Review Board and informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Results: There were statistically significant increases in students’ agreement that they had sufficient training in how to ask patients about suicidal thoughts and behaviors from pre-test (M = 3.55, SD = 0.76) to post-test (M = 4.40, SD = 0.50, t = -4.68, p < 0.001) and in students’ agreement that they had sufficient training to assess level of suicide risk from pre-test (M = 2.90, SD = 0.85) to post-test (M = 4.30, SD = 0.66, t = -6.66, p < 0.001). There were also statistically significant increases in students’ confidence in their ability to detect suicidal ideation from pre-test (M = 3.32, SD = 0.75) to post-test (M = 4.21, SD = 0.63, t = -4.16, p < 0.01) and in students’ comfort asking about symptoms of suicide ideation from pre-test (M = 3.65, SD = 0.81) to post-test (M = 4.55, SD = 0.61, t = -3.94, p < 0.01). With regard to the ASP scale, the mean score decreased (indicating less negative attitudes) from pre-test (M = 29.00, SD = 5.12) to post-test (M = 27.76, SD = 5.18) but this change was not statistically significant; t(17) = 1.08, p = 0.30.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to increase social workers’ comfort and confidence in suicide prevention by providing training during their graduate social work education. Virtual suicide prevention training reduces logistical challenges to implementation and may offer increased access to geographically dispersed groups of learners. Participants reported substantial perceived impact following the training, indicating the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of this delivery mode. Given our results, there is a strong rationale to bring this intervention to scale and embed it into social work curricula as a brief module in an existing course.