Year 4
January 15, 2023 - January 14, 2024
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Overview
Overview
PROGRAM GOALS
GFOL outreach activities with community organizations, government entities, media outlets, and school groups.
Kevin Hines visits Guam to raise awareness and inspire action toward suicide prevention.
PROGRAM STRENGTHS
In its fourth year, GFOL made progress toward the goals for the grant. Significant strengths include continuing partnerships with various community organizations and government agencies to recruit and train individuals as natural supports and for workforce development. GFOL exceeded the benchmark for training natural supports and direct service providers for workforce development during 2023.
The partnership with UOG resulted in the award of 2 fellows in Year 4 following the graduation of the previous 2 fellows. The Fellows will engage in research to expand data on individuals with lived experiences through their study, “Suicide Ideation Survivors: Exploring Guam’s Experiences.” The Fellows will collect data in Year 5.
The GFOL partnerships with the Todu Guam Foundation, UOG Press, Gametime, Inc., and WestCare Pacific Islands provided services to 1254 “at risk” youth. Gametime, Inc. utilized evidence-based screening at their events and referred a total of 6 youth for services.
GBHWC saw continued success in providing a critical service for individuals in need of immediate assistance locally through the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This is evident from the 3,065 individuals served through 988 during this review period. GFOL also successfully promoted the Lifeline through social media and static and local ads with an audience reach of 484,582.
Additionally, the GFOL’s team should be commended for their strong leadership and committed staff that are working to achieve each of the year’s goals. This is evident by the significant number of benchmarks met or exceeded in Year 4 and the overall progress made in all other goals.
PROGRAM BARRIERS
In Year 4, some progress was made on implementing the Zero Suicide Framework. The Implementation Team met with the Zero Suicide consultant and reviewed the suicide care pathway, but focused efforts need to be made to implement the ZSF plan in Year 5.
In Year 4, progress was made in establishing the Suicide Prevention Working Group and determining the goals of the group. The challenge is keeping members engaged. In Year 5, the Working Group needs to hold a strategic planning meeting and conduct a needs assessment to review the current policies and protocols within youth-serving organizations.
27 follow-up surveys were completed in Year 4, which is a 4% completion rate. Although feedback collected in the survey thus far shows that the training is beneficial to both natural supports and direct service providers, the current sample size is too small to effectively measure impact. Maintaining communication with training participants in Year 5 is going to be crucial to meeting this benchmark.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The GFOL team continued to deliver training, conduct outreach activities, and implement the ZSF in Year 4. As recommended for Year 4, the team should continue to focus on targeting specific groups of people in the community to receive training as natural support and for workforce development to meet the target numbers for Year 5. These groups can be selected based on the demographic of those most “at risk” from the 2022 Suicide Statistics provided by Dr. Annette David.
In addition, GFOL will need to maintain contact with individuals trained as natural supports or direct service staff to collect follow-up data in Year 5. Regular communication can be established for those trained, and consideration should be made for incentivizing the survey.
Require partner organizations to utilize evidence-based tools to screen at-risk youth at all partner events to meet this benchmark. Include comprehensive data on youth screening when reporting.
As GFOL continues to carry out the goals outlined in the ZSF implementation plan, a plan for training GBHWC staff in ZSF should be developed and implemented in Year 5.
The Suicide Prevention Working Group is encouraged to hold regular meetings as well as work towards conducting a needs assessment to review the current policies and protocols within youth-serving organizations in Year 5.
CONCLUSION
Overall, the GFOL team should be commended for their achievements in Year 4 of the grant project having met or exceeded many of the benchmarks. Significant progress has been made in all three of the project’s main goals. The team continues to be actively engaged with their community partners to increase awareness and break the stigma on suicide and mental health, generally. Plans for Year 5 have already been made for training, outreach, and additional data collection.
annual report
annual report
Y4 Annual Report.pdf
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