142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

311863
Community Resilience Teams: Leveraging Social Cohesion to Address Gun Violence in New Haven Neighborhoods

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014 : 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM

Carley Riley, MD, MPP , RWJF Clinical Scholars Program, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Brita Roy, MD, MPH , RWJF Clinical Scholars Program, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Mark Abraham , DataHaven, New Haven, CT
Ann Greene , New Haven Urban Design League, New Haven, CT
Nurit Harari, MD, MHS , Indian Health Services, New Haven, CT
Georgina Lucas, MSW , Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Robyn Porter , Newhallville Community Resilience Team, New Haven, CT
Marjorie S. Rosenthal, MD, MPH , Department of Pediatrics and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Jerry Smart , Yale-New Haven Hospital Primary Care Center Transitions Clinic, New Haven, CT
Teresa Smith Hines, MSHS , African American Affinity Group, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Stacy Spell , West River Neighborhood Services Corporation, New Haven, CT
Barbara Tinney, MSW , New Haven Family Alliance, New Haven, CT
Anita Vashi, MD, MHS , Center for Innovation to Implementation, Veterans Administration Pal Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA
Pina Violano, MSPH, RN-BC, CCRN, CPS-T , Trauma Department, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT
Maurice Williams , Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Emily Wang, MD, MAS , Department of Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Background: Between 2000-2010, New Haven experienced high rates of homicide (10/100,000 residents per year), with the annual homicide rate tripling in the past five years. While New Haven experienced a violent crime rate of 4 per 1,000 residents in 2013, certain neighborhoods bore a greater burden, with violent crime rates up to 30 per 1,000 residents. This violence results in chronic community-level trauma and stress, undermining health, capacity, and productivity of these neighborhoods. Methods: Stakeholders from city, community, healthcare, and academic organizations created a partnership to prevent and respond to gun violence. We adapted the RAND Roadmap to Building Community Resilience, a framework to strengthen community resilience in natural disasters, to strengthen community resilience around episodes of gun violence. We developed a local intervention strategy to build community resilience through an iterative process of community engagement, involving 6 small informant groups and targeted assessment surveys of 43 residents. Results: 51% of participants reported having a trusted source of information following an episode of gun violence; most could not identify a trusted neighbor. Data supported a two-pronged strategy as a means of preventing and responding to gun violence: (1) creation and distribution of a Community Resilience Handbook for neighborhood residents to address selected levers of the RAND framework and (2) community organizing in two pilot neighborhoods with high crime rates and low social cohesion. Conclusion: Promoting community resilience by adapting a natural disaster framework is a novel approach to gun violence. This presentation will discuss the collaborative, its challenges and successes.

Learning Areas:

Advocacy for health and health education
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
Discuss how community-level persistent violence undermines community capacity to support community safety, health, and well-being. Describe the history, theoretical framework, process, and community perspectives on community resilience building efforts in high-violence neighborhoods of New Haven, CT. Identify ways community resilience teams may apply post-disaster resilience-building models and tools to prevent and respond to gun violence.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am a pediatric critical care physician and current research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University. I am principal or co-principal investigator on multiple research projects examining community-level factors that either undermine or promote community health and well-being. I am active in research around violence and violence prevention, including work through the Society of Critical Care Medicine.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.