Jacksonville Area Non Profit To Use Data Analytics to End Veteran Suicide
The Fire Watch now has the most up to date LOCAL data in the country, to help end veteran suicide in our community.
Jacksonville, FL Thursday August 12,2021- For Immediate Release: For decades, access to recent and actionable data on veteran suicide has been an insurmountable challenge for veteran-serving organizations working to end this national tragedy. Data has only been available from the federal government – data that is more than two years old and stops at the state level.
We can do better. Together with analytics firm NLP Logix and supported by a grant from The Partnership: For Mental Health, a project of Baptist Health and the Delores Barr Weaver Legacy Fund at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida, The Fire Watch has collected non-identifiable, county-specific data on local veteran suicides from 2010 through 2019. This data became available in July 2021, and The Fire Watch is already using it to focus outreach efforts and suicide prevention programming. The same data is also now available to the community on The Fire Watch website at Firewatch Data. Visitors can view the veteran suicide count, the veteran suicide rate, and the number of veterans within any of our five Northeast Florida counties. Results can be sorted by age, gender, and ethnicity.
No part of Northeast Florida is untouched by the tragedy of veteran suicide. The rate of veteran suicide in our region from 2010 to 2019 (per 100,000 veterans) is 31.6, which is on par with national numbers. The rate of Northeast Florida civilians during the same period is half that, or 16.0. This is also consistent with national numbers and means our veterans are dying by suicide at a rate nearly twice that of civilians. Our highest count over the last 10 years was in 2019 with 78 veteran suicides. Duval County had the most suicides that year, but Baker County had the highest rate of veteran suicides. Both the count and the rate increased over the 10-year period across the region.
The Fire Watch was created to reverse these trends. “This data is enormously impactful,” says Executive Director, Nick Howland. “Not only does it help us establish a baseline to measure the success of our veteran suicide prevention programs, but it also allows us to identify hotspots – whether along our coast or in a more rural area – and focus our prevention efforts there. We can now build a community support network right where it is needed most.”
Fire Watch Founder and K9s For Warriors CEO, Rory Diamond, states, “We based The Fire Watch on the experiences our K9s For Warriors team has had reaching out, lending a hand, and being there for our Warrior graduates. It is an attempt to recreate that support network on a larger level in Northeast Florida. Now we are doing it in a data-driven way. No one else is doing anything like this, anywhere in the country.”
“The data science team at NLP Logix is very proud to support The Fire Watch and work with them to bring the power of data analytics to help address the high suicide rates among our veterans,” says NLP Logix CEO, Ted Willich. “As a decade-old Jacksonville-based company, we are honored to be a part of this effort in Northeast Florida.”
The Fire Watch, founded in November 2019, is Northeast Florida’s fight to end veteran suicide. Its cornerstone innovation is the Watch Stander program: an early intervention network of community members trained to identify risk factors of veterans in crisis and to direct those veterans to the resources they need. The program is free and available to everyone. You can learn more about it and us by visiting: Who We Are and What We Do.
NLP Logix is an artificial intelligence/machine learning product and automation solutions provider, which has evolved over the last ten years to one of the fastest-growing teams of machine learning practitioners. Our team of experts has extensive experience leveraging data analytics, natural language processing, computer vision, neural networks, and predictive modeling to help companies revolutionize how they operate. For more, visit https://www.nlplogix.com/.
The Partnership: For Mental Health is a project of Baptist Health and the Delores Barr Weaver Legacy Fund at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida. The intention of this innovative project, recommended by Delores Barr Weaver, is to encourage joint learning and make strategic grants to strengthen and improve access to the system that provides mental and behavioral health care in Northeast Florida. The fund will consider proposals made by 501c3 nonprofit organizations throughout the year that address direct service, advocacy, awareness, training, and more. For more information about The Partnership: For Mental Health, see https://www.jaxcf.org/receive/how-to-apply#partnershipmentalhealth.
