Pediatric Suicide Prevention and Risk Detection

Nearly 70% of youth in Franklin County who died by suicide from 2015 through 2017 had been seen at Nationwide Children’s Hospital at some point in their lives. More than 80% of those who had been cared for at Nationwide Children’s had been seen in the 12 months before their deaths.

That’s in keeping with what other studies across the United States show: there are opportunities to assess risk and engage in suicide prevention strategies that are not always being used.

“Zero should be the only acceptable number of suicide deaths,” says Meredith R. Chapman, MD, medical director of the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at The Ohio State University School of Medicine. “This is not about blame. It is about improving how systems support at-risk youth.”

To help address the issues, Dr. Chapman and her colleagues spearheaded a multi-year, systems-based quality improvement initiative across health care, school and community settings. A recent publication on the effort is explored in Pediatrics Nationwide, along with a discussion of suicide risk screening tools that are used in health care.  

“It is so important for disparate systems to work together to address this challenging problem,” Dr. Chapman explains. “No single solution will reverse the rising suicide rate, but together, we can make an impact.”

Published June 2025