Health officials attempt to monitor, prevent Suicide Deaths

Eureka, Ca. (KIEM) An effort to monitor and prevent suicides in Humboldt County is underway.

The Humboldt County Coroner’s Office will investigate local suicides by using a risk assessment profile.

The goal of this initiative is for county health officials to learn how to prevent future suicide deaths.

Created by an Oregon epidemiologist and her team, the assessment profile comes with a checklist that tracks real-time trends to determine who in the community is most at risk of suicide, and what system changes can be made.

The checklist includes basic questions among others such as evidence of addiction, financial or job problems, and relationship stress.

“The overall desire is that the review team really hopes to decrease the rate of suicide in Humboldt which is 2 1/2 times greater than the rest of California,” said Dana Murguia, Senior Program Manager of DHHS. “Were using data that comes directly from the coroner’s office and we’re also helping the coroner’s office to implement a systematic review of every single death by suicide.”

Representative for California’s Second District, Jared Huffman, said he thinks forming the suicide fatality review team is another step in the right direction.

Humboldt started using the checklist at the beginning of 2019.