We are proud to announce our first evaluation of the CALM Conversations can save lives training program has been completed. Â As the developers of CALM we had a number of things we wanted to achieve:
- A program that was evidence informed and drew on the latest research that is informing suicide prevention in Australia.
- A program that was face to face to ensure safety of participants.
- Training that was flexible and affordable to meet the needs of diverse communities.
- A model that is easy to remember and implement but also one that was based on theory.
- A program that utilised technology as well as the lived experience of members of the community to destigmatise suicide and enable help seeing behaviour.
We wanted CALM to:
- Expand local knowledge and skills, contributing to community mental health literacy, while improving the capacity for community-led informal care.
- Raise suicide awareness and empower informed, calm and supportive conversations which could potentially save lives.
- Provide people with the knowledge, confidence and skills to engage in a conversation about suicide with somebody needing hope
- Empower participants to recognise and respond to suicide risk, have a conversation about their challenges, reconnect to self and hope and ultimately develop a meaningful and person centred safety plan.
- Ensure people understanding the importance of follow up and the positive impact of engaging with the person post their thoughts of suicide
Data collected both anecdotally and through feedback obtained from participants indicates we have not only met our objectives but far exceeded them.
To ensure our findings are meaningful and can be substantiated over time we have recently engaged an external evaluator to conduct further evaluations – hopefully this will be completed by early 2020.
1000 participants can’t be wrong, so give us a call to further discuss our findings.
