A new study is highlighting hospitals as a key component to gun violence prevention. Researchers with Minnesota-based organization The Violence Prevention Project and HCMC linked patient data from 2013-2022 and Minneapolis homicide data from 2018-2022. They found that 1 in 50 patients admitted to HCMC for violent injury, later appeared in homicide records as a victim, a perpetrator or both.
The results also show patients were disproportionately young and male, and injury locations clustered in socioeconomically disadvantage neighborhoods. The median time between prior trauma admissions and homicide involvement was 3.5 years.
Jillian Peterson, executive director with The Violence Prevention Project, said hospitals are often thought as reactionary to gun violence. But this study revealed hospitals have a role to play in prevention.
“Knowing that so many of these young men were hospitalized — for most of them firearm injuries — years before they were involved in a homicide makes you think about that moment is a real turning point, and is a real opportunity for prevention, not just reaction,” Peterson told Minnesota Now host Nina Moini.
HCMC does have a violence prevention program in the hospital called Next Step. It serves other area hospitals as well. Dr. Derek Lumbard, a trauma surgeon at HCMC and co-author of the study, said the program works to provide trauma-informed case management and services.
“We often say that survival is only the beginning when somebody is violently injured,” said Lumbard, “and so this this one-on-one case management allows for people that experience these awful incidents to have support and have another advocate for them when they are in the hospital and when they leave the hospital.”
Lumbard worries that funding for this program could dry up as HCMC faces a financial crisis and grant money for health care also dwindles.
“It's massively important that this that this group continues to be funded,” he said.
Researchers believe the data is an undercount, because it doesn’t include other the Level I trauma centers in the Twin Cities metro: North Memorial and Regions. Peterson hopes this study shows how important it is to share data across industries and services.
“There's a lot of the same people in all these data sets, but when we're not connecting them, we're not seeing that interconnectedness of our work,” Peterson said.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation on Minnesota Now with Peterson and Lumbard.
