Pennsylvania hospitals and health systems are hoping it will be violence-free.
Taking part in the American Hospital Association’s coalition to combat violence, PA hospitals are supporting the Hospitals Against Violence national day of awareness for ending all forms of violence on June 8.
Violence has consequences that stretch far beyond the individual. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 2.3 million people are treated in U.S. emergency departments each year for violent injuries, costing more than $85 billion in medical expenses and lost productivity. Violence also impacts the community by decreasing property values and disrupting social services.
Because of the physical and emotional scars left on victims and the widespread effects of violence on neighborhoods, hospitals across the state are committed to helping communities address violence before it occurs and to providing support for victims.
Hospital Programs Tackling Violence
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia put into effect its own program, the Violence Prevention Initiative, to protect youth from violence through educational programming in schools and the community, screening for risk in clinical settings and direct casework with injured youth and their families. The program supports children who have been exposed to violence, preventing physical, emotional, and developmental health challenges, long-term physiological and brain changes, school failure, drug abuse, and delinquency, as well as future violence-related injuries. It has become a global model for hospital-based and community-delivered violence prevention.
In response to the disturbing number of youth-involved homicides each year, Temple University in Philadelphia created an interactive, hospital-based educational program, called Cradle to Grave, that invites at-risk youth to attend a two-hour session in which they step into the shoes of a real-life teenager who lost his life to gun violence. Using his medical records, the participants of the program follow the teenager’s life from its beginning to the procedures used in efforts to save his life. Taking the participants throughout the hospital setting and introducing visuals of the aftermath of gun violence, the program exposes youth to the reality of violence and has produced significant improvements in the beliefs young people have about violence.
Efforts to prevent violence in Pennsylvania communities don’t stop in Philadelphia. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Mercy, and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC started their own violence prevention initiative in response to increasing homicide rates and the prolonged effects violence has had in Allegheny County. The effort uses resources to better understand neighborhood dynamics associated with violence and develop intervention strategies for reducing the homicide rates. Another aspect of the initiative is the Gunshot Reoccurring Injury Prevention Services (GRIPS), which works to prevent firearm assault re-injury and criminal involvement. The program introduces at-risk gunshot victims in the hospital room to counselors and other firearm assault survivors, with whom they establish goals to reach within a six-month period as they recover, such as finding employment to finishing schools.