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Background: First aid training is widespread throughout the world to give members of the public skills to help an injured person before medical help arrives.While first aid training is common, it generally ignores mental health crises such as how to assist a suicidal person.This project introduced guidelines for how a member of the public should provide first aid to a person who is suicidal, i.e.has expressed suicidal thoughts or intent or has made a suicide attempt.Expert consensus is the basis of the guidelines that are available for physical first aid and this strategy has been used to develop suicide first aid guidelines.There are formal methods for assessing expert consensus that have been used in many areas of health research.The most commonly used consensus method is the Delphi process.Methods: Separate panels of experts have been formed in India, Japan, the Philippines to develop guidelines that are appropriate to each of these countries.These countries have been chosen because they are Asian countries with different cultural and religious contexts, different rates of suicide, different levels of economic development, and different levels of availability of mental health services.Approximately 30 experts from each country have been recruited by the key project collaborators.The panel members were asked to complete an on-line questionnaire which consisted of a list of first aid actions to rate.Three rounds of the rating were organized and, at the end of each round, any items that reached the agreement criterion were selected for inclusion in the guidelines.Results: The output from the Delphi process was a set of agreed upon action statements, which have been used to develop three country-specific Suicide First Aid Guidelines and will be presented at this conference, together with an outline of training programs for community members based on such guidelines.Conclusion: Community members must be educated on how to recognized and promptly respond to suicide risk.We aim to use these research-based guidelines to develop a suicide training program in India, Japan and the Philippines and intend to develop guidelines for other countries.