Health Services Research & Development

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Suicide Prevention Research Impact NeTwork (SPRINT)

Steven Dobscha, MD

Steven Dobscha, MD

The overall goal of this CORE is to accelerate suicide prevention research that will lead to improvements in care, and that will ultimately result in reductions in suicide behaviors among Veterans. SPRINT’s Principal Investigators are: Steven Dobscha, MD, Director, HSR&D’s Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care (CIVIC); Mark Ilgen, PhD, Research Career Scientist, HSR&D’s Center for Clinical Management (CCMR); and Teresa Hudson, PhD, PharmD, Associate Director of HSR&D’s Center for Mental Healthcare & Outcomes Research (CeMHOR).

Goals/Themes

The overall goal of SPRINT is to accelerate suicide prevention research that will lead to improvements in care, and that will ultimately result in reductions in suicide behaviors among Veterans. The major domains of research to be supported by this CORE include:

Mark Ilgen, PhD

Mark Ilgen, PhD

  • Activating and educating communities to support Veterans’ engagement in their health and healthcare. This includes developing and testing systems approaches (including coordination of services – and activating families and communities) to facilitate help-seeking and engagement in care.
  • Match services to Veterans’ needs. Includes developing and testing methods for matching level of risk to prevention approaches, as well as tailoring prevention approaches for at-risk Veterans (e.g., women, transitioning Veterans, Veterans prescribed long-term opioids, and homeless Veterans).
    • Teresa Hudson, PhD, PharmD

    Teresa Hudson, PhD, PharmD

  • Scale, implement, evaluate and sustain existing evidence-based and promising interventions, including improving the implementation of emerging and evidence-based interventions such as brief structured psychotherapy interventions.

Partnerships

In collaboration with HSR&D leadership, VA operations partners, other stakeholders, and suicide prevention (SP) researchers, SPRINT will identify and prioritize gaps in SP health services research and establish a focused SP health services research agenda for SPRINT members.

"Through the development of a network of dedicated researchers, SPRINT is creating a repository containing information on current evidence, active projects, and partner priorities, and by providing methods and implementation consultation and a pilot program, we hope to facilitate high-quality, high-priority, and high-impact suicide prevention research." - PI, Steven Dobscha, MD.