Project Summary
During Tier II, our Stakeholder-Driven Veterans’ Suicide Protection Advisory Group (VSPAG), partnership team, and key stakeholders will refine comparative effectiveness research (CER) questions into a single research question addressing—through a diverse series of engagement activities—protective factors against suicide in the veteran population. At the start of Tier II, we will host a VSPAG Kick-Off Meeting, which will serve as the project’s official launch to energize and strengthen our Tier I partnerships with veterans, their friends and families, and service providers and set the tone for continuing the project’s critical work examining suicide protection in our veteran population. In Tier II, we will finalize our governance process and create a governance flowchart for stakeholder distribution. We will build on our Tier I recruitment and outreach plan, creating a comprehensive communication plan to engage new stakeholders and stakeholder organizations for potential collaboration for proposal development and dissemination. Through our communication plan we will raise national awareness about veteran suicide protection. Throughout Tier II, stakeholder partners will participate in engagement activities including face-to-face and virtual meetings, national suicide prevention conferences, research-oriented webinars and community networking events, and empirical development of CER questions. VSPAG will host a town hall meeting so key stakeholders can present CER ideas, voice their opinions, and ask questions of the VSPAG. At the end of the Tier II, the VSPAG will identify a final innovative CER question and clear-cut work plan for the development of a stakeholder-driven veterans’ suicide protection proposal in Tier III.