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When we all worked eight-hour shifts, “my” shift was evenings. Most nights I reported off to the same night nurse, a woman about my age who was an excellent nurse and also simply a nice person to be with. One evening I came to work to learn that my new friend would not be at work for a while. She had tried to kill herself.
A surprising lack of suicide data for nurses.
Did you know that there are national data on the suicide rates of physicians, teachers, police officers, firefighters, and military personnel, but none pertaining to suicides of nurses? Or that many hospitals have long offered screening for suicide risk to medical staff and medical students, but not to nurses? The lead news story in this month’s AJN, “Suicide Among Nurses,” highlights these and other findings of a recent National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, “Nurse Suicide: Breaking the Silence.”
Many reasons for this silence.
Judy Davidson, a nurse scientist at the University of California San Diego and the lead author of this paper, points out that there are many reasons for the silence around this issue. She notes that suicide data in general are inconsistently recorded, and that even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not code suicide mortality by occupation.
In addition, she says, because suicide is an infrequent occurrence in health care organizations, the need to track the problem and devise preventive measures often is overlooked.
The stressors faced by nurses are well-documented. Learn more about how we might better define the problem—and about efforts to identify high-risk nurses and initiate treatment—in this month’s AJN.
Thank you for drawing attention to the topic of nurse suicide. The main mortality database of the CDC that contains all states is not coded by occupation. However, there is a special restricted dataset, which does not contain every state, that does. We are studying that data now to learn more about nurse suicide.
Thank you, Judy. That information is very helpful. We’ll look forward to hearing more as data becomes available!