When a patient commits suicide in hospital, it is
regarded as an adverse event. The National Core Standards
for Health Establishments in South Africa indicate that
adverse events are sub-domain in the domain of Patient
Safety, Clinical Governance and Clinical Care domain which
includes support of any affected patient or staff (National
Department of Health, 2011). The criteria in this subdomain
requires that the health establishment actively
encourages reporting of adverse events. Therefore each
health establishment should design a procedure to report
the adverse event.
In this specific hospital, management of such adverse
events includes in-depth investigation of the incident. A procedure
of writing incident reports, often called statements, file
analysis by quality assurance coordinators, clinical managers
and nurse managers is followed to investigate the incident.
The reports are written to assess the clinical status of the
patient prior to the incident, to facilitate preliminary investigation.
Inpatient suicide is an unnatural death that is reported
to the South African Police Services (SAPS) who further
request statements from nursing personnel involved. Postmortem
of the deceased, in case of successful suicide is
mandatory as part of investigation for confirmation of injuries
that led to the death of the patient.