Veterans accessing Veterans Affairs (VA) health care have higher suicide rates and more characteristics associated with suicide risk, including being male, having multiple medical and psychiatric comorbidities, and being an older age, compared with the general U.S. population. The Veterans Crisis Line is a telephone hotline available to Veterans with urgent mental health concerns; however, not all Veterans are aware of this resource. By contrast, telephone triage is a national telephone-based triage system used by the VA to assess and triage all Veterans with acute medical or mental health complaints.
Objective
To characterize Veterans who call telephone triage because of suicidal ideation (SI) or depression and to identify opportunities for suicide prevention efforts among these telephone triage users using a biosurveillance application.