Telephone Assessment of Suicidal Risk at Prehospital Emergency Medical Services: A Direct Comparison with Face-to-Face Evaluation at Psychiatric Emergency Service.

Assessment of suicidal risk is one of the most challenging tasks faced by health professionals, notably in emergency care. We compared telephone suicide risk assessment at prehospital Emergency Medical Services Dispatch Center (EMS-DC), with subsequent face-to-face evaluation at Psychiatric Emergency Service (PES), using French national Risk-Urgency-Danger standards (RUD). Data were collected for all suicidal adult patients ( Mean of the differences between the RUD score at EMS-DC and PES was -0.825 (SD = 1.19), and was found to be significant ( Telephone evaluation of suicidal risk using RUD at EMS-DC yielded moderately higher scores than those obtained by a subsequent face-to face evaluation at PES, with this difference partially explained by the time between assessments, and by clinical and contextual factors.