The PREVENTS Roadmap requires the federal government to work with partners from state, local, territorial and tribal governments, as well as private and nonprofit entities, to determine best practices to improve Veteran quality of life and reduce suicides. VA was charged with leading interagency efforts to advance current suicide prevention efforts at the state, local, tribal and community levels by raising awareness, expanding support and maintaining efforts to reach at-risk Veterans.
VA partnered with Aptive HTG, which brought a historical understanding of how the roadmap was developed, strong program management support and the know-how to create implementation plans for the 46 agency actions.
PREVENTS depends on community engagement. Aptive helped execute site visits and host town hall meetings, community events and roundtable discussions to build a national coalition with leaders who shared a passion for preventing Veteran suicides. In addition, PREVENTS emphasized forging partnerships across agencies and non-governmental entities to increase impact.
After extensive foundational work to determine key barriers to accessing mental health and opportunities to address these issues, Aptive developed project management and program evaluation artifacts for PREVENTS. Once agency actions were incorporated into actionable implementation measures, Aptive helped VA implement the roadmap with:
To help VA measure implementation progress, Aptive created a centralized tracking database with different ways to measure actions through convenient dashboards. Through these dashboards, VA could oversee progress, track implementation activity and follow up. This effort examined milestones and key performance indicators, providing a picture of action implementation.
Aptive expanded its support to help additional work streams implement and evaluate suicide prevention initiatives. In addition, the team helps adjust tactics to meet the project scope, integrate opportunities and deliver products on schedule.
In the project’s early stages, Aptive helped form connections with communities and governmental and non-governmental partner organizations to share knowledge and explore ways of increasing awareness of suicide prevention initiatives among Veterans. Since developing implementation plans for the PREVENTS agency actions, VA has used Aptive’s support to execute action items and expand support to other SPP teams.
The PREVENTS Roadmap calls for federal action to increase suicide prevention among Veterans. As VA continues to implement strategies to raise awareness and connect Veterans to resources, Aptive provides critical program support, developing talking points for leaders, reporting progress and strategizing solutions to ensure success.
