Engagement, preference and identity: Proposing a developmental engagement framework.

Suicide, death by misadventure and other serious incidents are a regular occurrence at mental health services (National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health, ). Beyond the impact on the community members and familial and social connections, suicides and other serious incidents can have a major impact on mental health workers (Haylor et al., ; Holden & Card, ; Lyra et al., ; Niishi et al., ; Sandford et al., ; Wilshke & Crepeau-Hobson, ). The way in which mental health services investigate and deal with such incidents is important for everyone involved, and steps need to be taken to ensure mental health services can learn and improve from these incidents while also minimizing the negative impacts on their workers. Current models available for dealing with serious incidents in mental health services often rely upon processes such as root cause analysis (RCA) that seeks to find a linear root cause of the incident through analysing documentation such as case files and client notes (Deshpande et al., ). However, questions have been raised regarding the appropriateness of RCA in mental health services (Deshpande et al., ; Haylor et al., ; Vrklevski et al., ), as linear causality is rarely found (Deshpande et al., ; Vrklevski et al., ). Despite the rigorous nature of the RCA process, it does not directly address the negative impact on mental health staff, following a suicide or other serious incident. Thus, there is a need to investigate additional models of responding to serious incidents (Fröding et al., 2024; Hagley et al., ) where services can reflect and learn, while also providing support to all parties involved. The aim of the present study is to investigate the experience of mental health service staff taking part in a dialogically informed, non-punitive, person-centred process to investigate serious incidents known as the serious incident review panel (SIRP). The impact of suicide on the community is widespread. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for young people aged 15–25 in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, ). Beyond the impact on families (Kehoe et al., ), there is also a significant impact on the mental health workers who have been involved in the care of these young people (Haylor et al., ; National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health, ; Pratt & Jachna, ) and a flow on effect on the culture and practice within mental health care services (Rytterström et al., ).