Development of guidelines for hospital care of suicide attempts in adolescence

This article aims to describe a quali-tative and quantitative study of the construction and validation of guidelines for hospital care of adolescents with suicide attempts. The method-ological approach involved an integrative litera-ture review with thematic content analysis of 27 articles, which generated 3 categories: assessment of suicidal behavior in the context of the emer-gency department; intervention in suicidal be-havior, and hospital multidisciplinary team. The content of these categories was the basis for the construction of an instrument with 15 statements about the performance of adolescents in suicid-al crisis assisted in the hospital setting. This in-strument was applied with 20 healthcare profes-sionals selected from two hospital institutions in southern Brazil, who acted as judges/evaluators of the proposed statements. The content of the 15 statements was validated as guidelines through the Percentage of Concordance Calculation and the Score Calculation. The constructed guidelines may help multidisciplinary hospital teams when facing adolescents with suicide attempts, to base their conduct on criteria that guide actions of re-ception, assessment, intervention, and referral.