Strategic Organizational Communications
Summary
Throughout my college career, I have been heavily involved with QPR suicide prevention training. It all started with a beginner-level class, COMM 100, and Andra Hansen introduced the training to us. Since then, I have assisted her with being in the class and being a moderator as she did them over zoom. Last semester, I started a project to spread awareness of this training on campus and had a goal of getting 100 students trained. We were able to surpass our goal and get 298 students trained. This was just the start of my involvement with QPR suicide prevention training.
I wanted to become a trainer. I wanted to spread the knowledge that I had to others. I decided that my project had to be becoming a certified QPR trainer. With that, I started by doing research on suicide in the area and the United States. I also was able to look at some research that Andra Hansen had from her years of being a QPR trainer. Part of what I wanted to do was spread awareness, so I started a Tiktok and posted 3 videos there. My main focus was on becoming a trainer and being a compassionate trusted trainer. I was able to do the training online and it is an extensive training. This training took 14 hours to complete. The QPR institute provides an instructor manual, and after I completed the training, I read through it completely.
After completing this training I worked on outreach. I had a goal of having 50 people trained, and I wanted to use my resources. I talked to church leaders about holding training as a church activity. I created a poster and a form to sign up. I hung these posters around the campus in every building. I also emailed the poster out to each department at Brigham Young University- Idaho to get the word out. I was able to secure a room on campus but had to switch to a different, bigger room due to the number of people that signed up. I also created a pre and post-training survey so that I could see if the training is effective. You will be able to see the results as you continue to read.
The QPR institute provides you with presentation slides to use and I was able to take those and personalize them. Since I knew that my training would be for college-level students in Idaho, I wanted to put in statistics that would pertain to them. Because of copyright, I will not be including the presentation slides that the QPR institute provided for me.
Due to nerves, but also because I wanted to make sure that the training ran smoothly, I held two different practice sessions. I was then able to hold an in-person training and had 74 people show up. I also held a training via zoom and had 29 people show up. A total of 103 people were able to be trained. Following the in-person training, I had someone from BYU-I’s Scroll ask for an interview. Then following the zoom training, I also had someone from BYU-I radio ask for an interview.
Part of the training is being certified and I was able to talk to Andra and ask her what I do for the certificate. She told me that the QPR institute allows you to create a certificate so I was able to do that and send it to all those that have taken the training that I provided for them.
I was also very interested in learning what people thought of the training and looked over the data that I got from the pre and post-training survey. There were a couple of people that had questions and so I reached out to them. I then created the charts to show the data.
In October, a suicide bereavement expert came to the area and I had the opportunity to get trained by her by unfortunately that weekend I fell ill. Instead, I was able to attend an event in November with keynote speaker Jen Marr, who focuses on comfort and showing up, especially with grief and suicide. I felt like this helped me to better understand how I can teach QPR.
Overall, I am grateful for the experience to become a certified QPR trainer and be able to train my first batch of people. I am looking forward to more trainings and for ways that I can learn and improve.
Poster I designed to hang around campus.
Certificate that I designed to give out to those that took the training.
Certificate I received for completing the instructor training.