Eastern Shoshone Tribe IHS Methamphetamine and Suicide Prevention Initiative (MSPI) Suicide Prevention Demonstration Program

The purpose of the Eastern Shoshone Suicide Prevention Demonstration Program was to develop and implement a comprehensive and sustainable program to reduce suicide attempts and the number of successful suicides in Eastern Shoshone communities.

The approach was developed to address identified needs and had four primary goals:

• Increase community awareness, support, and coordination for suicide prevention.
• Strengthen community-based capacity and resources for providing screening, early identification, referral, and follow-up of at-risk adults and youth as well as support for their families.
• Develop and implement a community-based “crisis response” program to assist families, friends, peers, and the community when a suicide occurs.
• Contribute to a knowledge base of effective strategies for suicide prevention in American Indian communities through participating in local and national evaluations, building capacity for local data collection and evaluation, and dissemination of findings.

Sundance Research Institute assisted the Eastern Shoshone Tribal health department as the evaluator of the demonstration program. Internal evaluation and monitoring of the Eastern Shoshone Suicide Prevention Project were conducted and reported annually.

The four primary components of this internal evaluation and monitoring were the following:

• Monitoring the implementation/operations of the program, problems encountered, resolutions of problems, and lessons learned.
• Assessment of the effectiveness of the training components of the project in terms of increased knowledge of participants and perceptions of training program participants of effectiveness and usefulness of the training components.
• Establishing baseline measures for requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act and annually updating these data.
• Annual reports on the progress and implementation issues and lessons learned, prepared and provided to the Tribe to assist in program monitoring and reporting.