New Scale to Assess Aggression in Inpatient Mental Health Pediatric Patients

Over the last couple of months, the teams have been at work implementing and coordinating use of a new scale, the Dynamic Appraisal of Situational Aggression Youth Version (DASA-YV). This is so that we can regularly assess and measure aggression for our Carilion Mental Health Child and Adolescent Inpatient patients (Rehab 3). This is now implemented, built into the Epic nursing shift assessment flowsheets, and also set up to automatically display these latest scores on Teletracking for staff to visually see the levels on the unit. Over time, this will enable teams to identify patients rising in aggression to analyze, review, and implement interventions to mitigate aggressive episodes.

Special thanks to Joelle Kennedy, Amber Mitchell Beemer, AJ Martin, Dawn Johnson, Katie Corring, Erika Trinkle, and Lisa Dishner for their collaboration and support!