Research In Action

Moderator's Note: Dr. Rachel Myers, CIRP Associate Director and Co-Director of the Community Violence and Trauma Support programs at the Center for Violence Prevention, recently wrote a CHOP Research Institute Cornerstone blog post sharing her team's recent research on the implementation and impact of CHOP's Violence Intervention Program (VIP) on the recovery from both firearm and non-firearm injuries experienced by children and adolescents. Below is an excerpt of the blog post.

Since 2020, firearm injuries have remained the leading cause of death for American children and adolescents, surpassing all other injury and non-injury causes. But these firearm-related fatalities reflect only a small portion of the burden of injuries resulting from interpersonal violence experienced by children and adolescents, which contribute to nearly half a million Emergency Department visits annually.

“Despite many hospital-based violence intervention programs providing care exclusively to firearm-injured patients, nearly 85% of our CHOP VIP patients receive care following a non-firearm injury,” said Hillary Kapa, MPH, Clinical Research Associate at the Center for Violence Prevention (CVP).

Programs such as the CHOP Violence Intervention Program (VIP), part of CVP, serve as a bridge from the hospital to the community. As one of the most established pediatric Violence Intervention Programs in the country, the CHOP VIP team conducts innovative work to explicate this model of care and establish the unique needs of pediatric patients and families affected by violent injury.

To support recovery from both firearm and non-firearm injuries experienced by children and adolescents, programs such as CHOP VIP are rapidly expanding nationally, resulting in a need to improve understanding of program implementation and establish evidence-informed tools to carry out this work. My colleagues and I have recently published two studies advancing our understanding of nuances in VIP care in the pediatric healthcare setting, disseminating complementary evidence-based resources to support holistic post-injury care and recovery.

Exploring the Impact of Injury Mechanism on Recovery Needs

In the first study, published in Injury Prevention, our team conducted a retrospective cohort study of patients who received care at CHOP for a violence-related injury. We examined characteristics of CHOP VIP implementation, including enrollment, engagement, retention, and recovery needs, and whether these characteristics varied by mechanism of injury, including firearm and non-firearm. While patients who enrolled in VIP following a firearm injury participated in the program for longer and identified more recovery needs than non-firearm injured patients, both groups of patients had robust retention rates and similar proportions of case management needs resolved throughout program participation.

“Our results provide a model of how the field of violence intervention programs can systematically describe and document program implementation,” said Dr. Kapa, the lead study author. “This underlies our ability to conduct more rigorous evaluations.”

Developing Evidence-Informed Tools for VIP Program Delivery

In our second study, published in Health & Social Care in the Community, our team used data from the VIP to develop a set of evidence-informed tools to guide case management. These tools may enhance fidelity of program delivery and provide clarity around community-focused case management. We conducted a retrospective, qualitative analysis of over 2,000 patient encounter notes from the CHOP VIP, which were written by program staff to document the case management care provided to patients and their families. We mapped these case management activities to 62 discrete recovery goals across 12 need-specific domains, related to areas of physical and psychosocial well-being.

Read the full blog post here.