A 5 Year Analysis of a Hospital-Based Violence Recovery Program (1502702887)
Elizabeth A Bryant, Manuel Castillo-Angeles, Deepika Nehra, Marta Chadwick, Ramsis Ramsis, Leo Andrew Benedict, Reza Askari, Ali Salim
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Background: Hospital based violence intervention programs have been established in several major cities to address recurrent violence related trauma admissions. Our hospital established a violence recovery program (VRP) in 2012 to provide in hospital and community case management for victims of violence. The aim of this study was to assess the short term performance of our program and to identify the characteristics of patients who actively utilized the resources that were offered.
Methods: This is a single-center retrospective study that includes patients admitted from 2012 to 2016. Data was obtained from the VRP's case management database and the trauma center's Trauma Registry. Participants who were initially approached by the VRP but refused further interventions were classified as "non-users," whereas those who had a minimum of 3 encounters with the VRP were classified as "high-users." Demographics and injury characteristics were compared between non-users and high-users. Specific services utilized by high-users were examined.
Results: 447 patients met inclusion criteria, of whom 134 (30%) were high-users. The high-users compared to non-users were younger (p=0.0005), more likely to be black (p<0.001), more likely to have sustained a gunshot wound (p<0.001) and had longer hospital lengths of stay (p<0.001). The service most commonly utilized by the high-users was housing assistance (63%), followed by employment assistance (59%), and safety planning (41%).
Conclusion: Over a five year period, our VRP provided extensive assistance to 30% of eligible patients. We did not identify any modifiable factors differentiating high-users from non-users. Further work is ongoing to identify barriers to utilization of VRP services in an effort to improve utilization and also to evaluate longer-term outcomes.
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