We hope you are enjoying summer. This short, summer edition of your newsletter contains some important figures, some good news and a new resource we hope you will review and find helpful in your suicide prevention work.

News! Our most recent tally of gatekeepers trained in the US alone now stands at 640,000 Can we make it a million by year’s end? You are all doing great work and together we are making a difference.

Numbers:

160 colleges and universities are now teaching QPR

350 new QPR Certified Gatekeeper Instructors trained since January, 2008

32 new Advanced Clinical Trainers certified since January, 2008

News, Opportunity and a Short Notice! Together with the Spokane County Public Health Department, the QPR Institute is hosting a QPR Certified Gatekeeper Instructor's Course on August 11th in Spokane, Washington. If you know of anyone wishing to become an Instructor, or if you took your training in self-study format and wish to attend, at no cost, a registration form can be found in the center section of our home web page. Pre-registration and pre-payment are required. The last day for registration will be August 8th, 2008.

If you have not visited the Eastern Washington or Northern Idaho areas and our “near nature, near perfect” part of the world, this would be a great time to do so.

New Resource! Please visit www.meansmatter.org and learn all you can about the important research and recommendations available on this web site. This site is sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and features, in one place, extremely useful findings and reports to integrate into your presentations and work, both as public health educators and as clinicians providing service.

Thank you! For those of you who responded to Joe Munson’s request for survey data to complete his Ph.D., Joe says, “I cannot fully express my gratitude to you and your trainers in helping me surpass the sample size needed to continue with this research on clinician survivors. At this time, I have 109 completed surveys that will be used in my data analysis to determine the impact that suicide has on clinicians. It is my hope that the construct of posttraumatic growth will be significantly present and we will have more knowledge of why some clinicians can overcome and prosper, while others continue to suffer. If there are any questions about this research please feel free to contact me at jsmunson@ufl.edu.”

News! An agreement has been made with Community Advisory Services Aotearoa (CASA) to customize the QPR Gatekeeper training for all of New Zealand. This is an exciting new partnership and we look forward to working with suicide prevention leadership and our colleagues down under

Staff and Faculty
QPR Institute