2. Identify priority problems and set long-range goals.
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Resources are almost always limited and every campus has multiple and competing concerns, so planners must make difficult decisions about which problems to focus on first. Data on risk and protective factors and populations at highest potential risk will help support decision-making, as will data on interpersonal risk and protective factors, institutional factors, community factors, and the greater society. Some factors pertain to people, but others pertain to the surrounding environment, which can have a significant effect on suicidal behavior.
Initially, planners should ask how they would like the problems or conditions they have described to change. Getting to Outcomes™ (GTO), a comprehensive program planning manual for prevention practitioners, suggests that focusing on conditions or behaviors that are being targeted for change will help planners avoid a common pitfall in goal-setting: describing the completion of a program as a goal. For example, “conduct gatekeeper training” is not a useful goal statement. Instead, a goal statement should describe a future condition planners want to achieve, such as “increasing the number of staff who can recognize suicide warning signs”.
Useful questions suggested by GTO to ask in setting goals include:
- What will change?
- For whom?
- By how much?
- When will the change occur?
- How will it be measured?
