Penn Nursing 090805_final_4c - University of Pennsylvania School ...

The team is shown working together here to examine
the results of recent data collection from ongoing
monitoring of gun violence.
findings, like there are more gun suicides
than gun homicides each year in
the U.S., they suddenly listen.When we
go on to say that the risk of dying from
a gun is about the same in big cities
and small towns they are in disbelief,
but they go on to rethink the safety of
their communities.This kind of truth
campaign, in my mind, is a major contributor
to the positive change that
FICAP creates,” Dr. Branas says.
In fact, in their analysis of more
than 500,000 deaths between 1989 and
1999 in more than 3,000 U.S. counties,
Dr. Branas and FICAP colleagues found
that the risk of gun suicide in rural
communities was slightly higher than
the risk of gun homicide in big cities.
The message to public health officials:
firearm death is a problem affecting all
types of communities across the country,
not just urban centers.
A new investigation shows, further,
that firearm violence shortens the average
life expectancy of an average
American by 104 days, ranking the
U.S. 30th, well behind other affluent
nations, according to a study to appear
this fall in the Journal of Risk and
Insurance. “While the discovery of a
new drug or procedure slowing down
the effect of prostate cancer would
only have an insignificant effect on
[total] life expectancies, a drastic reduction
in firearm deaths would add many
years of life to potential victims and
possibly lead to a significant improvement
in U.S. life expectancies,” says
author Jean Lemaire, PhD, Professor of
Insurance and Actuarial Science at
Wharton School, who received
research funding from FICAP.
It is especially at the community
level where FICAP has been a catalyst
for positive action. Dr. Schwab and Dr.
Richmond led a trauma center-community
partnership study, teaming with
trauma centers in three smaller cities
(Bethlehem, Pennsylvania;Youngstown,
Ohio; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa) to help
citizens understand firearm violence as
a local issue and begin to reach consensus
on solutions.
These trauma center-community
partnerships involve a physician director
and coordinator who established a
local advisory board, collected data,
built community coalitions, and developed
local initiatives.Among the other
resources it supplied, FICAP analyzed
the data and provided each site with
community-specific profiles of gun
violence
“By understanding the circumstances
surrounding firearm injuries, the
community is more likely to develop
policies that might address these circumstances,
and some of these policies have
nothing to do with ‘gun control,’ ” notes
Janet Weiner, MPH,Associate Director
for Health Policy at Penn’s Leonard
Davis Institute of Health Economics,
who works with FICAP scientists to
translate research into policy messages.
She points particularly to the
Medical Professionals as Advocates
Program.At the Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania site, for example, officials
initially presumed the major local cause
of firearm death was drug-related
homicide.Actually, data showed the
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