Leaving a psychiatric hospital can mark the end of a mental health crisis, but it does not necessarily mean a person has gotten their life back. Someone may leave the hospital with improved symptoms, medications, and follow-up appointments, yet still struggle to rebuild daily routines, reconnect with loved ones, return to work or school, or regain independence. Hospital discharge planning focuses on treatment and safety, but often leaves a fundamental question unanswered: How can we help people rebuild the lives they want to live?
From Discharge Plans to Recovery Plans aims to bridge this gap. We will develop and test a simple approach that helps patients identify what matters most to them and turn those priorities into concrete, achievable steps. Before leaving the hospital, patients will create personalized recovery plans focused on goals such as reconnecting with family, establishing daily routines, or returning to meaningful activities. A brief follow-up after discharge will help patients navigate obstacles and adjust their plans as needed. Working with 30 patients, people with lived experience, and hospital staff, we will explore whether this approach is useful and can be integrated into routine care. Our ultimate goal is to make recovery about more than reducing symptoms – it is about helping people reclaim meaningful, fulfilling lives.
In 2023, Washington state was awarded $6 million from the U.S. Department of Education to create a pipeline from Washington state’s five accredited Masters in Social Work training programs to K-12 schools. Called the Workforce for Student Well-being Initiative (WSW), 100 aspiring school social workers will receive conditional scholarships based on their financial need so the cost of getting an education is not a barrier to their getting an advanced degree and then committing to working in a high-need public or tribal school. The goal of the WSW is to help all K-12 students in Washington to thrive by advancing the careers of skilled school social work professionals through training and mentorship.
The Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF) is a Global South–North simultaneous training program that prepares students and early-career professionals to become global health researchers. Based in rural Uganda, the fellowship offers immersive, mentored experience in study design, data collection, implementation science, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Fellows contribute to ongoing community-based research alongside local partners, gaining practical skills in ethical engagement, cross-cultural research, and field-based methods. GHEF provides a distinctive opportunity to build research capacity, strengthen career development, and contribute to locally led global health initiatives through Empower Through Health.
A partnership to support perinatal health, family well-being, and early childhood development during the first 1,000 days (conception through a child’s 2nd birthday).
The Raising Washington Initiative seeks to develop an evidence-based, fully integrated perinatal support program that promotes the health and well-being of families during the first 1,000 days. The program will provide coordinated care, parenting support, health and wellness resources, and connections to community services for all families receiving care within UW Medicine.
Through patient- and provider-informed care pathways, family navigators, and accessible information and resources, Raising Washington will help families successfully navigate pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood. While available to all families, the program will also identify those who may benefit from additional support and connect them with specialized services to address their unique needs as early as possible.
To learn more this work, please contact Project Manager Lori Ferro, MHA at ljf9@uw.edu.
This project will identify interaction patterns with online video platforms that are indicative of suicide risk, focusing on YouTube and TikTok. Leveraging archival data including over 5 million interaction events collected from participants in previous research, we will use combinations of neural language models to identify suicide-related “like”, “search” and “watch” events. We will then assess the temporal relationships between suicide-related interaction events and suicidal ideation, behavior and mental health challenges reported by these participants. Building on these analyses, we will proceed to model patterns of interaction, differentiating between user-initiated (e.g. search) and algorithm-prompted (e.g. recommended content without a preceding search) content to characterize the ways in which intentional and algorithmically-driven behavior drive exposure to suicide-related content. In addition, we will develop a prototype of a privacy-preserving risk monitoring tool, which will detect interactions with concerning content and leverage light-touch intervention strategies to mitigate its impact.
This project outlines a comprehensive two-year initiative aimed at enhancing suicide care services in primary care settings. The project addresses a critical gap in the continuum of care by providing interim crisis support for at-risk patients who are waiting to be connected to specialty mental health. The main objectives of this project are to develop two innovative interventions intended to be delivered in a primary care setting: an adapted caring contacts protocol and a system to provide short-term, centralized remote monitoring of patient’s suicide risk. In designing these interventions, we intend to leverage technology such as digital/online platforms and remote monitoring systems that will support asynchronous patient check-ins. Finding innovative ways to offer support to patients in primary care settings where there is limited clinician time and typically an even more limited behavioral health workforce is imperative to creating a sustainable program. Therefore, our proposal intends to maximize the use of technology and focuses on self-guided and/or automated approaches.
This project uses a co-design approach to develop these interventions, where we will elicit input directly from patients and caregivers on the acceptability, feasibility, and appropriateness of these interventions. We hope this project will improve the timely support and management of suicide risk among primary care patients, ultimately enhancing services in outpatient settings while supporting the Least Restrictive Environment Framework, to enhance patient outcomes, reduce unnecessary referrals to overburdened emergency departments, and promote the overall well-being of patients and their families.
This project aims to partner with rural, urban, and suburban pediatric primary care practices in Western Washington to improve access and effectiveness of suicide prevention programs through adapting the SAFETY-A intervention for use in primary care settings. This project has the following aims: (1) assess needs of primary care staff, patients, and parents/caregivers for suicide prevention services in primary care, (2) iteratively design and refine a SAFETY-A based suicide prevention model of care prototype for primary care, (3) Pilot test the model of care, compared to treatment as usual, with 3 primary care clinics in rural, urban, and suburban settings.
Suicide is a leading cause of death among 10-to-24-year-olds. Primary Care (PC) often serves as a trusted resource for adolescents and young adults (AYA) and their families; and routine wellness visits provide important opportunities for early detection of suicide risk. Importantly, nearly half of those who die by suicide contact their PC clinic within one month prior to suicide. Unfortunately, suicide prevention resources for PC are limited, with a particular gap in short-term risk management and intervention services for lower risk patients and patients with STB who are waiting to be connected to specialty mental health care. Furthermore, parents/caregivers (hereafter referred to as parents) represent a key protective factor for suicidal AYA. Yet, few interventions have been developed to leverage parent support and increase parental self-efficacy to prevent AYA suicide. The current project partners with a digital mental health app, iKinnect, to adapt it for use in PC. iKinnect is designed to improve parent and AYA communication and parental selfefficacy to prevent risk behaviors, including suicide behaviors. The tool uses a parent and AYA paired interface and was originally designed for implementation with high-risk youth involved in the juvenile justice system. Intervention components include parent and AYA content including safety planning, skills for emotion management, parent coaching on lethal means restriction, expectation and goal setting, earning/providing rewards and praise, and modeling videos for parents. While promising, the program has yet to be tested with AYA presenting with suicide risk in PC.
This project will 1) identify the unique barriers autistic young adults experience in accessing full-model Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for suicidal thoughts and behaviors and non-suicidal self-injury in community settings, 2) determine needed adaptations to DBT from the perspectives of service providers and recipients, and 3) user-test elements of a redesigned DBT protocol.
