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With the close of National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, it’s worth pausing on Eliot’s year-round commitment to and practice of Zero Suicide. Eliot has integrated the Zero Suicide framework across the agency’s divisions, adapting its principles and practices to our work and communities, and expanding its implementation over the last several years.
Zero Suicide categorizes self-harm as a preventable outcome of gaps in care, and works to embed the systems, training, and follow-up into organizational methodology to close those gaps. At Eliot, the framework now reaches programs and services across the agency, anchored largely by the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) model and supported by an internal Zero Suicide staff committee. This work is redefining what strong suicide-specific care actually looks like in practice, ensuring the person stays at the center of every intervention.
Quality of Outcomes
Foundational elements to measuring suicide-specific care include tracking completion of interventions such as clinical trainings, client risk assessments and safety plans, and clinical consultations. Since Eliot began offering the training in 2019, 297 clinicians have completed foundational CAMS training. Staff have also completed 1,211 Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) trainings, 1,403 Lethal Means & Suicide Risk/Stanley Brown/Safe-T trainings, and 108 completions of Working with Suicide Risk, with additional continuing education available that staff regularly access. Since adopting the Stanley Brown Safety Plan, Eliot staff have completed 33,167 individualized safety plans with clients, and the Zero Suicide committee has facilitated 230 clinical consultations since the model’s implementation in 2021.
Over the past six months, Eliot’s Zero Suicide committee has also begun pushing past using just these counts into innovative methods and techniques that both deepen and expedite outcomes for participants. Clinicians now use a case conceptualization tool—built by the committee—in real-time during sessions. The committee is also developing a protocol to measure how well staff use this tool, moving the key internal question from whether it was completed to how skillfully it was applied.
For clients with multiple prior suicide attempts, the committee created a standardized quarterly review cycle. Each review weighs prior recommendations, risk scoring, and treatment history together, so the agency’s highest-risk cases get consistent, structured attention on a set schedule. The committee is also exploring how to build caring-contact outreach directly into clinical notification workflow, so a check-in happens automatically at key points in a client’s care.
Along the way, the committee has bridged operational gaps, including documentation blind spots, and worked to shorten the time between assessment and active treatment. Committee members describe the goal in practical terms: stay involved, find problems, fix them, and support the care teams doing frontline work with clients.
Outside Expertise and Perspective—How Eliot Stands Out
Eliot’s use of CAMS has drawn attention from outside the organization. Dr. Kevin Crowley, a clinical psychologist with CAMS-care who has provided ongoing consultation to Eliot’s clinical teams for years, described what impresses him about how Eliot has built the model into its work.
“It’s still sadly unique to have an organization champion EBPs [evidence-based practices] so much,” Dr. Crowley said. “It’s incredibly unique to not just champion the treatments, but also make sure clinicians feel really comfortable with how to use them.”
That support takes a specific shape at Eliot: weekly consultation groups, some focused on adolescent care and some on adult care, where clinicians bring cases and build skills over time with input from CAMS trained leaders on staff. Crowley also pointed to the organization’s willingness to update that support as the evidence base moves. “A particular strength of how Eliot does CAMS is how open they are to always evolving with the data,” he said, citing how the organization has worked new research on brief CAMS adaptations for acute settings, including emergency departments, inpatient units, and mobile crisis teams directly into care pathways as it emerged.
Crowley noted that CAMS covers only part of Eliot’s broader Zero Suicide work, focused mainly on the engagement and treatment stages of care. But he described what he views as a culture that brings new clinicians into that support immediately. “We had people who came into CAMS supervision in the last two weeks who were on their first day at Eliot,” he said. “Eliot takes the approach that ‘From the jump, we’re going to get you comfortable talking about suicide, comfortable hearing about suicide, learning how to navigate it, and supported by a team that you have regular contact with.'”
Asked whether he would recommend Eliot, both to someone seeking services and to a colleague weighing a job there, Dr. Crowley answered quickly. “I would say yes to both, and I wouldn’t really think hard about it,” he said. “On both sides, we’ve got you, and we’re willing and supportive and game to have hard conversations.”
He added that the level of ongoing training and consultation clinicians receive at Eliot stands out in the field: “It is not a guarantee that people are going to get training like this… I would have been over the moon to have a training site like this, or to start out here early in my career, for sure.”
Work That Continues
The Zero Suicide committee describes its own work as ongoing: closing gaps as they’re found, and refining its tools as the evidence changes. Suicide-safer care is an ongoing test of whether current practice holds up, and a willingness to change it when it doesn’t.
As Suicide Prevention Awareness Month ends, that testing continues at Eliot, the same as it does every other month of the year.
