In Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, every day, emergencies deal with 10 suicide attempts. It’s a lot. “Our region is one of the most affected by the phenomenon, along with Brittany and Normandy,” underlines Corinne Calard, deputy director at the CHU.
The difficulty: in two-thirds of cases, the authors of a “TS” stay in the hospital for 24 hours, at most, and only a minority of them engage in specialized care after returning home. . Recurrences are therefore not uncommon. Out of ten first suicide attempts, three will be followed within a year by a recurrence, according to national statistics.
Build a network
Preventing the repetition of the gesture: this is the whole objective of the VigilanS system that the Dijon University Hospital has deployed, since December, in Côte-d’Or and in Nièvre. The principle: ensure patient follow-up over time (at least six months) by recontacting them by telephone or, if they cannot be reached, by post. The CHU is not alone at the helm. It forms a network around the suicidal person by first informing the attending physician of the entry into the VigilanS device.
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Today, “we have 193 patients” for whom “we are on standby”, explains Maud Benetti, hospital practitioner, head of the coordination team. The CHU has an envelope of 600,000 euros to finance the time devoted to monitoring by nurses – including Maud Maumy, nurse at the CMP in Decize. They made or received 437 calls and sent 30 postcards.
In Nord-Pas-de-Calais, where VigilanS was designed and implemented in 2015, this monitoring – which, by the end of the year, will be extended to Yonne – has helped to reduce emergency room admissions for TS. They went from 10,119 in 2014 to 7,780 in 2021. “By including 60% of suicidal patients in the system, we obtain a reduction in attempts of 46%”, specifies Guillaume Vaiva, psychiatrist at the Lille University Hospital, co-founder of VigilanS . Alexandra Caccivio
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