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A control group of 44 of 100 patientsreceived no support from the VIP team. The 56 others met with team members and helped form individual plans that included substance abuse treatment, job training and assistance, educational help, conflict resolution training and family development services, plus regular home visits and group sessions.
The researchers found that patients who received help were three times less likely to be arrested for a subsequent violent crime than those in the control group. In addition, the patients in the control group were six times more likely than the intervention group members to be hospitalized as a result of a violent injury and were much less likely to be employed.
— Bob Glissmann
In the hours after a shooting victim is wheeled into the emergency room at one of Omaha's two hospital trauma centers, as many as 30 friends and relatives of the victim can pack the ER waiting room — sometimes crying, yelling and calling for revenge.
“That can get to be a tense situation if you don't know what you're doing,” said Ben Gray, who is the emergency team director of Impact One, a nonprofit violence intervention group.
“They hear rumors about who did what, and the first response of anybody when your loved one has been harmed is to retaliate.”
Gray and others on his team try to defuse tension and steer people away from retribution, noting that it will only make a bad situation worse.
“Sometimes, it's the difference between preventing retaliation and not preventing retaliation,” said Gray, an Omaha City Council member. “It's a critical piece of what we do.”
For now, Impact One has an informal agreement with Creighton University Medical Center and the Nebraska Medical Center to talk with folks in their ERs. But a more formal commitment may be in the works.
Officials from the Nebraska Medical Center (the hospital) and University of Nebraska Medical Center (the academic entity) are meeting today with State Sen. Brad Ashford to discuss how they might play a bigger role in the local violence intervention effort.
“We're ready, willing and able to work on the issue,” said Dr. Robert Muelleman, who is director of the Nebraska Medical Center's emergency department and a UNMC professor.
Creighton officials also have been supportive of the concept, Ashford said.
Hospitals in major metropolitan areas across the United States have set up violence intervention and prevention programs inside their walls. Omahans have visited some of the programs to get ideas, and organizers from other cities have come here to talk about what they do.
Dr. Patrick Tyrance, an Omaha orthopedic surgeon who has a master's degree in public policy from Harvard, recently visited Baltimore and reviewed the Violence Intervention Program at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“I think that a hospital-based program can provide a missing link as far as addressing issues of violent crime in the community,” Tyrance said.
Dr. Carnell Cooper, a trauma surgeon at the Baltimore hospital, started the program 10 years ago, after tiring of treating the same shooting victims again and again. The program has a $450,000 annual budget and a team of eight people. That team includes Dr. Cooper, a social worker, a case manager and a parole/probation officer, said Dawn Eslinger, the program's director.
Team members ask victims of shootings, stabbings and beatings whether they want to participate in the program and, if so, help the victims fill out a 112-question survey outlining their risk factors.
Questions address what happened to bring the person to the ER; whether the person is in school, employed or in a gang; and whether he or she has been a victim of abuse, uses drugs, carries a gun or gambles.
The answers help organizers and participants form a treatment plan and are compiled for statistical purposes.
The program, which includes home visits and group sessions after the person is discharged from the hospital, enrolls about 200 people a year, Eslinger said. Through contact with friends and relatives, she said, team members end up working with 500 to 600 people a year.
Eslinger said surviving a shooting and dealing with the pain of the injury provide an opportunity for victims to reassess their lifestyle and the actions that brought them to the ER.
“Over 90 percent of the patients are interested in doing something so they don't go through this again,” she said.
Mike Friend, director of the Nebraska Office of Violence Prevention, said he sees value in getting hospital staff members involved in dealing with more than the victim's physical injuries.
“These are the first folks, not necessarily on the scene but involved with the victim,” he said. “It's really important from an information gathering standpoint. ... Sometimes they're the folks that are right in position to deal very delicately with a touchy situation.
“I think this has got to be a part of any comprehensive strategy that we put together.”
Gray would welcome some help. “We need a more formalized relationship with the hospitals,” he said.
Gray and other Impact One team members sometimes reach into their own pockets to provide financial help to victims and their families. They also have helped victims find jobs. If the victim dies, Gray said, the team helps the family deal with the funeral home or address other needs.
Ashford, the Omaha legislator who pushed for the creation of the state's violence prevention office, said he hopes the medical community will help.
“There's so much more we can do,” he said. “We need to have a full-blown public health initiative to stop not only violence but the youth behavioral health issues that lead up to the violence.”
Contact the writer:
444-1109, bob.glissmann@owh.com
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