SEYMOUR · SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODELLING FOR SUICIDE PREVENTION
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-02-01 → 2025-01-31
- EU contribution
- €295,940
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODELLING FOR SUICIDE PREVENTION
Suicide is one of the leading causes of mortality among young people aged 15–24 globally. The suicide mortality rate is one of the indicators within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3, and the WHO Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan (2013–2030) identifies young people as a high-risk group. Despite increasing investment in suicide prevention activities from many governments worldwide, we still do not know which interventions, policies, or programs, for which groups of young people, for how long and with what intensity could generate the greatest reductions in youth suicide rates. Progress in youth suicide prevention has been stalled by many factors including: • A lack of involvement of young people in the design of interventions meaning that they are not youth-focused and, therefore, not acceptable to end-users. • A lack of planning for the systematic uptake and implementation of strategies in the real world. • Limited adequacy and accuracy of current methodological approaches (e.g., meta-analyses, regression models) which do not account for the interdependence of suicide risk factors as they operate across multiple levels (e.g., individual, social, health system); and consider the complexity of health systems and the influence of factors such as healthcare constraints. SEYMOUR (System Dynamics Modelling in Suicide Prevention) offers a novel paradigm for guiding the efficient and effective deployment of national and global youth suicide prevention strategies using system dynamics modelling (SDM). SDM is a computer-assisted method that helps frame, test and simulate the causal processes and interactions that underlie complex systems or behaviours (such as suicide) to inform policy making. A unique selling point of SDM is that it may be guided by a participatory approach, which leverages empirical data together with the experiential knowledge of stakeholders, to inform model building, evaluation, and implementation. The overall objective of SEYMOUR was to adopt participatory systems modelling to develop and evaluate a computational model to inform youth suicide prevention policy, planning and implementation in Australia and the UK.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Globally, suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 15-29. Many European countries have seen a sustained increase in youth suicide rates in recent years. Despite the deployment of comprehensive and multilevel suicide prevention strategies, we still do not know which suicide prevention interventions, for which groups of young people, for how long, and with what intensity could generate the most significant reductions in youth suicide rates. Therefore, we cannot efficiently and effectively inform decision-making in youth suicide prevention policy, planning and implementation. Current methodological approaches (meta-analyses, regression models) for synthesizing and operationalising research evidence used to inform suicide prevention strategies have limited adequacy and accuracy because they do not: respond to real-time suicide data; account for the interrelationship, interdependence and nonlinearity of suicide risk factors as they operate across multiple levels (e.g. individual, social); consider the influence of factors such as healthcare constraints (access, capacity). SEYMOUR offers a novel paradigm for guiding the efficient and effective deployment of national and global youth suicide prevention strategies through the use of system dynamics modelling (SDM). SEYMOUR will develop and evaluate a novel SDM that will demonstrate which suicide prevention interventions could generate the most significant reductions in suicide rates among young people aged 12-25. This will include an implementation blueprint to facilitate the transferability, internationalisation and adoption of the SDM as a decision-making tool in youth suicide prevention policy and practice in Europe and globally. The conceptualisation, formulation, testing of the SDM; and, development of an implementation blueprint will take place during Years 1 and 2 at UoM. The validation of SDM in the UK and adaptation of the implementation strategy (WP4) will take place during Year 3.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM · BirminghamCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
- UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE · MelbourneAustralia
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union