New NIH HEAL Tools for Suicide Prevention in Primary Care

Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative, are investigating ways to mitigate suicide risk for people who misuse opioids or have opioid use disorder (OUD) and for people with chronic pain.

People with OUD, people with chronic pain, and people with depression and other mental health disorders are more likely to die by suicide than the general population. People with OUD who also have a mental health disorder are at the greatest risk.

Half of people who die by suicide visit a healthcare provider in the month leading up to their death, and for most of these people, it is a primary care provider. Access these NIH HEAL-funded tools to identify and help patients at risk of suicide in primary care practices:

• The Zero Suicide model for standardizing suicide-risk identification and prevention throughout healthcare systems
• The Opioid Wizard, a clinical decision support tool for identifying and treating patients at high risk of opioid use disorder or overdose, calculating suicide risk scores, and completing suicide safety plans.

For more information about these tools and research, please access the original NIH HEAL Initiative news release.