Introduction:

the increase in suicidal behavior in adolescents is an important health problem, so training parents on suicide prevention in this population group is one of the great challenges for health professionals.

Objective:

to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational strategy on the prevention of suicide in adolescents.

Methods:

quasiexperimental research, before and after, without a control group, with 71 parents of adolescents with a history of a suicide attempt during the years 2018-2019 at the René Vallejo Ortiz Polyclinic in Bayamo. With prior informed consent, learning needs were identified and an educational intervention was designed that was subjected to the judgment of experts. Knowledge was measured before and after the intervention was applied. Absolute and relative frequencies were used, the McNemar test was applied with a significance level of p <0.05.

Results:

before the intervention, parents with inadequate knowledge about the changes suffered by adolescents (57.7%), the sexuality of their children (59.2%), the risk factors (49.3%) and the protective factors (57.7%) of suicidal behavior. The second evaluation, after the educational intervention, showed a significant increase in the level of knowledge in all the indicated aspects.

Conclusions:

the educational strategy increased the parents' knowledge about suicide prevention in adolescence, considering it effective.

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