Suicide Assessment Training: The Effect on the Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes of Mental Health Professionals and Trainees

This research will examine the impact of training in the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS), a suicide assessment and intervention protocol, on the knowledge, perceived skills, and confidence for providers at three different levels of training. The trainee groups will include Qualified Mental Health Professionals (County),1 master’s prepared third-year doctoral students on the Behavioral Health Consultation Crisis team (BHCC), and first-year psychology trainees (First-years). The three levels of participants were asked to complete a pre-test prior to and post-test immediately following their respective CAMS training. A 2 X 3 mixed ANOVA was conducted using different participant groups (experience) as the independent variable and knowledge, perceived skills, and confidence pre- and posttraining as the second independent variable to examine the within-subjects change in knowledge, perceived skills, and confidence over time and the interaction of the between subjects variable of experience. A follow-up one-way ANOVA and T-TESTS were completed. For knowledge, all groups improved significantly post-training but the training did not differentially impact the amount of acquired knowledge based on experience. However, for perceived skill, the groups came in with statistically different levels of skills with County more skilled than First-years. There was an overall pre-post improvement for all groups but First-years demonstrated relatively greater improvement in perceived skills. Similar to perceived skills, the three groups came in with different levels of confidence with County higher than First-years. There was a main effect of overall pre-post improvement in confidence with the First-years’ confidence increasing significantly more than the other two groups. 1Qualified Mental Health Professionals are defined by the Oregon Administrative Rules (OARs 309-016-0005-59) as licensed medical practitioners that can provide individual, family, and/or group therapy to clients with Medicaid