[Morbidity-mortality review in psychiatry: suicide or suicide attempts]

Further to the occurrence of three cases of suicide attempts or suicides within a few months, a psychiatric team introduced a method of evaluation of the professional practices on this subject.

The objective aimed by the team was to collectively identify the risk factors of the acting out and the strategies to prevent it.

The analysis and the treatment of unwanted events require an approach per problem. Because of the obligation for the doctors to perform an evaluation of their professional practices, a proposition to use a method presented by the High Authority of Health was looked for. Considering the necessity of favoring the exchanges between team members, the articulation of two methods was proposed: a morbidity mortality review (MMR) and an analysis of the detailed causes. The objective of the MMR is to analyze the deaths of certain predetermined morbid accidents within a service. The aim of the MMR is to highlight actions for improvement. The analysis of the causes allows the professionals to list all the causes of the problem identified, without limiting themselves to the immediate causes. In this case, a simple method was chosen: the Ishikawa diagram (or fishbone diagram, or also cause-and-effect diagram).

A specific Ishikawa diagram for suicide was created by the coordinating physician and was proposed to the team. In the term of the first MMR, the tool was improved by the collective clinical experience and served as support of analysis for the studied events. Three cases related to the evaluation were prepared beforehand by the referent doctor and later presented by him in MMR sessions. For each case, approximately a dozen of professionals were invited to fill in the biography of the patient. A discussion was then engaged by the external doctor on the circumstances of self injuries or suicide attempts. The three detailed analyses of cases were transcribed into a virgin Ishikawa diagram. Furthermore, several points were discussed on the safety aspects (diversion of the possessions with suicidal aim, and importance of the "almost incident") and on the interest in exchanging on the current and\or local professional practices (exchange on tools possibly used in the other psychiatric health establishments; favor the training). The actions of improvement put in perspective mainly concerned the professional practices. In this particular case, the awareness of professional knowledge was the most sought by the ancillary medical members of the team.

We observed an important investment of the team, as far as the MMR bases are concerned, on a shared clinical method. The participants easily got to grips with the tool. The initiation with the MMR tool was time consuming, in particular for the doctor coordinating the project and the referent doctor of the department (30 hours). The exchanges also permitted the assessment of the competence of each professional present, and the common priorities were fast identified and focused on sharing the professional practices. The intervention of an external speaker (doctor, qualitician or other) seems important since it favors the emergence of questionings in the team.

When faced with unwanted events such as suicides or suicide attempts, the MMR method allows the care teams to have time to ponder, listen and argument. What is learnt from dealing with unexpected events should enable the collective development of the capacity to react with the right reflexes when a surprising situation occurs. The RMM should find a place in the systems of clinical risk management, as a supplement to the declaration of the incidence. The results make it possible to anticipate on the use of the MMR in other thematic studies or issues of risk management.