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There Is a Need for a Comprehensive Toolkit to Help the U.S. Department of Defense Evaluate Its Suicide Prevention Efforts

• The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has been actively engaged in preventing suicides among service members, but evaluations of new and existing programs are critical for assessing the impact of DoD investments in suicide prevention.
• The DoD Task Force on the Prevention of Suicide Among Members of the Armed Forces and a RAND project on preventing suicide in the U.S. military both recommended that all DoD suicide prevention initiatives include an evaluation component.
• Such evaluations can be used to determine whether programs achieve their intended goals (e.g., raising awareness and promoting self-care among service members) and can be used as the basis for decisions about whether to sustain, scale up, or discontinue efforts.

The RAND Suicide Prevention Program Evaluation Toolkit Incorporates the Latest Scientific Research and Feedback from Program Staff Across DoD

• The toolkit's development included a rigorous examination of the program evaluation literature, which offers guidance and measures for a vast range of program types, resource levels, and expertise.
• It is important that the toolkit remain user-friendly while guiding program staff through the evaluation process. Pilot testing the toolkit with program directors and coordinators helped ensure that users would be comfortable using the tools and that the instructions were clear and applicable to the goals of their evaluations.

Evaluations are critical for assessing the impact of U.S. Department of Defense investments in suicide prevention and can be used as the basis for decisions about whether to sustain or scale up existing efforts. The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury asked RAND to draw from the scientific literature and create a toolkit to guide future evaluations of suicide prevention programs. The resulting toolkit is designed to help program staff determine whether their programs produce beneficial effects and, ultimately, to guide the responsible allocation of scarce resources. This report summarizes the three complementary methods used to develop the RAND Suicide Prevention Program Evaluation Toolkit: an examination of the peer-reviewed evaluation literature and clinical trials, a review of other evaluation toolkits, and feedback from staff responsible for implementing suicide prevention programs in the Department of Defense. It is intended to serve as both a companion and supplement to the toolkit and offers additional background on its development and testing.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Development of the Suicide Prevention Program Evaluation Toolkit

• Chapter Three

  Review and Feedback on the Toolkit by DoD Suicide Prevention Program Staff

• Chapter Four

  Recommendations for Disseminating the Toolkit

• Appendix

  Feedback Form Used in the Pilot Test of the RAND Evaluation Toolkit for Suicide Prevention Programs