Deliberate self-harm: emergency department nurses' attitudes, triage and care intentions

This exploratory study investigates emergency department nurses' attitudes towards patients who engage in deliberate self-harm. It examines their attitudes towards, and triage and care decisions with, patients who self-harm.

Emergency department nurses sometimes show unsympathetic attitudes towards patients who present with self-harm and these can contribute to difficulties in assessing and providing appropriate care.

A modified version of the Suicide Opinion Questionnaire was used. A non-probability sample of 43 emergency department nurses from a large Australian hospital participated in the study. Data were analysed using SPSS.

Most nurses had received no educational preparation to care for patients with self-harm; over 20% claimed that the department either had no practice guidelines for deliberate self-harm or they did not know of their existence and one-third who knew of them had not read them. Overall, nurses had sympathetic attitudes towards patients who self-harm, including both professional and lay conceptualizations of deliberate self-harm. They did not discriminate against this group of patients in their triage and care decisions.

The findings of this exploratory study are important because attitudes can affect care decisions. Recommendations are made for improving the educational preparation of emergency department nurses, for improving awareness and implementation of practice guidelines, and for improving attitudes towards patients with deliberate self-harm. Further research is needed to confirm these results.