Groundbreaking Suicide Prevention Initiative Launched by UWA

Ahead of R U Okay Day, The University of Western Australia has announced the launch an initiative that empowers researchers to explore and develop innovative strategies to better understand, predict and prevent suicide.

“Suicide services have substantial unmet needs. Our centre aims to bridge the gap by clarifying when suicide risk is greatest. Lives will be saved when services can be efficiently delivered to the right person at the right time.”

Professor Andrew Page, Interim Director at The Suicide Prevention and Resilience Research Centre (SPARRC)

The Suicide Prevention and Resilience Research Centre (SPARRC) will advance the mission of the Young Lives Matter Foundation, which worked for three years to develop a “risk index” – a self-harm prediction algorithm that alerts clinical staff to patients most at-risk of self-harm, enabling earlier intervention to prevent incidents.

The index achieved a 77.7 per cent successful prediction rate for self-harm incidents in pilot modelling, with the positive prediction rate being 400 per cent better than the international benchmark.

Interim Director of SPARRC, Professor Andrew Page from UWA’s School of Psychological Science, said the Centre aimed to expand and deliver the approach to a broader range of groups across the community.

“Suicide services have substantial unmet needs. Our centre aims to bridge the gap by clarifying when suicide risk is greatest,” Professor Page said.

“Lives will be saved when services can be efficiently delivered to the right person at the right time.”

SPARCC will focus on supporting those facing isolation, such as fly-in fly-out workers and communities, remote communities, and other affected groups.

Head of the UWA Division of Psychiatry in the Medical School, Professor Sean Hood, said the Centre will bring together expert research in psychology, psychiatry, public health, mathematics, indigenous studies, and education to further develop effective models to reduce the rates of suicide.

“Suicide Prevention is an essential goal of mental health research; however, many research groups have concluded that this is just too difficult and have resorted to secondary and tertiary prevention strategies instead,” Professor Hood said.

“Through an innovative, integrative and iconoclastic approach SPARRC continues to support research into the key issue of suicide prevention.”  

The Centre will also work to establish a ‘high-risk high-impact’ Igniter Fund to provide first stage ‘seed’ and second stage ‘accelerator’ funding for some of the most promising ideas with major potential at the early stages of research.