Crisis Centers are awesome! We are made up of passionate, compassionate, dedicated, hard-working people who do amazing work! We save lives! We deserve nothing short of sainthood!
So why aren't we universally loved? Why is it so hard sometimes to get recognized? To get funding? Why are some of us struggling to get by? Why do we need to keep hitting the pavement to talk about how awesome we are? What do we need to do to prove our worth? The answer: Show them the data!
And to show the data, we need common metrics.
Why do crisis lines need common metrics? That's likely the first question to cross your mind! It's certainly been on our minds from the get go. When Didi Hirsch partnered up with 9 other crisis centers in the state of California, we knew we wanted to tell a story about crisis centers' role in suicide prevention and intervention efforts in our state. And not just any story…a compelling story that reflected the dedication and expertise of countless volunteers and staff members in helping callers in crisis. But how do we do that cohesively, when we're all collecting slightly different data? We were faced with an "apples to oranges" dilemma. To tell a unified story, we needed to report on the same data.
But it's certainly easier said than done. If a crisis line has been collecting data in a certain way for years upon years, how do you change things up? How do you ask a crisis line to train (and re-train) what could be hundreds of volunteers? Well, here's a novel idea: Start by asking crisis lines what they believe is important data to collect. Next, engage crisis line directors and staff in discussing how to collect this data. And then, put together a training manual that provides rationale for why we're collecting this data. Here in California, we've done just that! It hasn't always been smooth sailing, but it has been a collaborative experience from the beginning and continues to be so. We have agreed to focus in on 6 Common Metrics, including demographics, reason for call, call volume, follow up, risk level, and caller satisfaction. Didi Hirsch, together with our colleagues at Crisis Support Services of Alameda County, Kern County Mental Health Services, San Francisco Suicide Prevention, StarVista Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, Suicide Prevention and Community Counseling—Marin, Suicide Prevention and Crisis Services—Yolo County, WellSpace Health Suicide Prevention and Crisis Services, Help, Inc., and Contra Costa Crisis Center, established the California Suicide Prevention Network (CSPN). This network has provided invaluable suicide prevention expertise and a very rewarding collegial collaboration (this means we all love each other).
Our aim has been to highlight the importance of ethically balancing our need for data collection with the more immediate needs of a caller in crisis. If you want to find out how we did, you can! We have a remarkable opportunity to share our common metrics process and the data we've collected at this year's American Association of Suicidology Conference, here in Los Angeles, CA. We invite you to come join us for our presentation titled: "Common Metrics=Common Sense for Crisis Lines".
To view an interim example of our center's common metrics and data collection with data through October 2013, click here. You will, of course, have to come to our workshop to get the most recent version!
~Sandri Kramer and Georgina Parra
Didi Hirsch Suicide Prevention Center, Los Angeles
[original source: http://www.networkresourcecenter.org/blog/default.aspx]
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