Key Dates

NOT-MH-20-068 - Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement for Service-Ready Tools for Identification, Prevention, and Treatment of Individuals at Risk for Suicide (R01 Clinical Trial Optional)

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

The NIMH intends to promote a new initiative by publishing a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to solicit applications for research on service-ready tools and technologies that can be used to advance training, quality monitoring, and quality improvement efforts and ultimately improve the availability of evidence-based suicide prevention services.

This Notice is being provided to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful collaborations and responsive projects.

The FOA is expected to be published in Autumn 2020 with an expected application due date in Winter 2021.

This FOA will utilize the R34 activity code. Details of the planned FOA are provided below.

Consistent with the goals of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, NIMH seeks to support research on strategies that could be used to reduce the rate of suicide in the US by 20% in 2025. To realize this goal, it is imperative that suicide prevention strategies be brought to scale at a level not seen before. There is a chasm between what research has demonstrated are useful strategies for suicide prevention and what is often delivered in healthcare systems. To bridge this gap and aid in the systematic implementation of evidenced-based suicide prevention services, the NIMH seeks to fund research on service-ready tools for identification, prevention, and treatment of individuals at risk for suicide.

The ultimate goal of this initiative is to encourage research aimed at (1) developing and testing the effectiveness of service-ready suicide prevention tools and (2) testing strategies to improve adoption, implementation fidelity, and sustained use of these tools, within an implementation science framework.

Suicide prevention within healthcare systems requires a multi-faceted approach, which in turn requires innovative strategies for identifying and addressing suicide risk. Tools that might advance suicide prevention goals include, but are not limited to: scalable strategies to facilitate administration and precision of screening, decision aides that can be used for risk stratification and for matching individuals to appropriate intensity of services across settings, tools that can be used to promote measurement-based care and quality monitoring, scalable approaches for training providers (e.g., to achieve initial competency and sustained fidelity), and tools to ensure empirically-supported brief interventions and psychosocial interventions for suicide prevention are delivered with a high level of quality across a range of clinical modalities, including technology-assisted fidelity aids and telehealth or other sustainable approaches to consultation.

NIMH encourages optimization and testing of tools and approaches that are scalable and sustainable. Applications will be expected to: develop tools that can be integrated into practice with minimal reconfiguration, incorporate the use of technology and/or other design features that make the tools scalable and robust against implementation drift, and utilize a deployment-focused approach that takes into account workforce capacity and system-level factors that influence potential integration of tools into clinical workflows.

This FOA will utilize the R34 mechanism to support pilot studies that are designed: to examine the feasibility of the research approach, (e.g., feasibility of recruiting and retaining participants); to provide an opportunity to refine and pilot test the experimental protocols, including assessment protocols and the experimental intervention protocol, as relevant; and to yield pilot data necessary for informing next steps and for enhancing the probability of obtaining meaningful results in subsequent, well-powered studies. Investigators focused on testing hypotheses that are supported by pilot data in studies that are powered to definitively answer the primary research questions are encouraged to consider NOT-MH-20-068.

This Notice encourages investigators with expertise and insights into this area of health services and suicide prevention to begin to consider applying for this new FOA.

Applications are not being solicited at this time.

Please direct all inquiries to:

Stephen O'Connor, Ph.D.

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

(301) 480-8366

stephen.o'[email protected]