American Medical Association's Youth Violence Prevention Training and Outreach Guide

This article describes the development and contents of a training and outreach guide Connecting the Dots to Prevent Youth Violence: A Training and Outreach Guide for Physicians and Other Health Professionals (the Guide) on youth violence prevention for healthcare providers developed by the American Medical Association. The Guide, was developed to help translate recommendations made by the Commission for the Prevention of Youth Violence in their 2000 report, Youth and Violence: Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health: Connecting the Dots to Prevent Violence, into healthcare practice. The Guide, which will also be available in Spanish in early 2006, is structured as a speaker's kit and includes prepared speeches, case studies, issue briefs, and copies of screening tools and patient education materials from a variety of sources appropriate for use in the clinical setting. Results of a preliminary evaluation of the Guide indicate that the training can be effective in increasing providers' awareness about the problem of youth violence and encouraging them to incorporate into healthcare visits violence prevention activities such as screening youth for exposure to violence and educating patients and caregivers on strategies for reducing the risk for violence.