Abstract

Suicide and intentional self-harm are significant problems for Australian communities. Monitoring suicide and self-harm hospitalisations is important for: the effective development of prevention and intervention initiatives; supporting accountability and transparency within systems and services that share responsibility for reducing suicide and self-harm; and robust program and system evaluations. This scoping review identifies and describes the peer reviewed academic literature that uses Australian suicide and hospitalised self-harm monitoring data. Our aim was to outline the analytic strategies authors use to draw meanings from this monitoring data, with a particular focus on change across time and spatial variance of suicide and hospitalised self-harm. Four electronic databases were searched for studies published between 2000-2020 (ProQuest Central, Web of Science Core Collection, PubMed, and PsycInfo), and 132 articles were included. Between 2020-2021, there was an overall increase in the number of peer reviewed publications addressing Australian suicide and/or hospitalised self-harm. Hospitalised selfharm is under investigated when compared to self-harm resulting in death. There is a significant delay between the generation of self-harm statistics and utilisation of that data by academic researchers. The very clear majority of article authors used ‘case only’ designs. Cohort and case-control designs, which are more able to provide information about causal inferences, were used infrequently. Few articles reviewed investigated spatial or spatiotemporal variance of hospitalised self-harm and suicide. Scan statistics were, by far, the most frequently used analysis authors of spatially or spatiotemporally focused articles. Of all articles reviewed, very few included analytic methods associated with data science and complex systems science. Researchers using Australian self-harm monitoring data ought to reflect on the analytic strategies that have been used to date within the peer reviewed literature when formulating their future research agendas.

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