Staying in Touch: Using Caring Contacts to Sustain Connections with Your Clients is an online curriculum that describes a low-threshold, Caring Contacts intervention designed to help providers reduce client self-harm, increase feelings of self-efficacy, and fill treatment gaps due to health disparities or other challenges.

A Caring Contact is a personalized written form of practitioner outreach to individual clients that expresses care and concern for their wellbeing. This simple, customizable intervention can be implemented at a distance during times of stress and isolation, making it a particularly useful addition to telehealth practices.

This curriculum:

• is self-paced, with expected completion time of less than an hour;
• outlines the scientific support for this approach to reduce client isolation and potential self-harm;
• focuses, in part, on special circumstances and populations that can be hard to engage and retain in care; and
• includes concrete examples of Caring Contacts, as well as modifiable templates that can be downloaded and adapted for any organization’s use.

   

Additional Resources

• Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SAMHSA). Features information, tools, training, and more.
• CAMS-Care: Preventing Suicide. Training and certification for the CAMS suicide prevention assessment, intervention and treatment. 
• Now Matters Now (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention). Personal stories and research-based ways (DBT, e.g.) for managing suicidal thoughts and emotions.