Abstract

Safe Harbor hospital-based violence intervention program

Sumala Haque, MSW, MPH¹, Shamsher Samra, MD, MPhil², Vincent Chong, MD, MS³, Dennis Hsieh, MD, JD⁴, Molly Deanne, MD⁵, Jennifer Murray, MSW, LCSW⁶ and Paul Carrillo, BA⁷
(1)Harbor UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA, (2)Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, Torrance, CA, (3)Department of Surgery, UCLA-Harbor Medical Center, Torrance, CA, (4)Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, Los Angeles, CA, (5)Department of Emergency Medicine, UCLA-Harbor Medical Center, Torrance, CA, (6)Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA, (7)Southern California Crossroads, Lynwood, CA

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Harbor-UCLA is the only Level 1 trauma center serving the South Bay of LA County, and it serves as a critical safety net hospital for residents living in areas with high rates of poverty and community violence. High trauma re-injury rates has led to a substantial interest in the medical community to implement Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Programs (HVIPs). Harbor-UCLA’s HVIP – Safe Harbor – directly partners with Southern California Crossroads, a community-based organization with extensive experience devoted to violence prevention and intervention efforts for positive development. Since Safe Harbor’s start in September 2017, we have engaged a total of 573 patients, of which 153 enrolled into the program and received a variety of services, including assistance with relocation, housing, medical bills, employment, education, substance use, mental health treatment, victims of crime benefits, SSDI paperwork, and individual mentorship. There are currently 35 actively accompanied clients. An integral part to this program’s operations is the hospital’s social work department. The role of a social worker has been an important component to the HVIP team in their ability to help bridge the transition from inpatient clinical engagements to outpatient community-based case management and accompaniment needs. This collaborative effort creates better referral patterns that help address the barriers and linkages to therapeutic services and advocacy. This approach brings a social work lens to training our case managers and helps define areas of population health in communities effected by trauma, by focusing on risk stratification for client needs to help break the cycle of violence.

Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs Program planning Public health or related organizational policy, standards, or other guidelines Social and behavioral sciences Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health