The evaluation of Uppföjlningssamtal - piloting a brief contact intervention (BCI) in a Swedish context

Despite over 50 years of research, the ability to accurately and reliably predict who will die by suicide is only slightly better than chance and has not improved with time (Belsher et al., 2019; Franklin et al., 2017; Large et al., 2016). Additionally, there is research that suggests interventions that are less time consuming and use fewer resources are equally effective as interventions that are lengthy and resource intensive (Fox et al., 2020). From a public health perspective, it is therefore imperative to develop and evaluate low-intensity interventions aimed at reducing suicide and suicidal behaviors that can be made widely available. Even though BCI is one of the few evidence-based intervention categories in suicide prevention, these types of low-intensity public health interventions are not being widely implemented in Sweden or evaluated in a Swedish context. 

This project will use a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and scalability of the implementation of a novel pilot BCI intervention in Sweden. The approach will combine semi-structured interviews and process data, as well as stakeholder and participant experiences, to create a comprehensive and nuanced evaluation, providing both breadth and depth of understanding. In-depth stakeholder interviews will be combined with process data to describe feasibility, acceptability, and scalability from the stakeholder perspective. Participant experiences will be assessed through a survey and semi-structured interviews to examine acceptability and perceived outcomes of the intervention from the participant perspective.