Strengthening Doctor-Patient Relationships Through Hospital-Based Violence Interventions

Violence in Chicago has been persistently high in low-income communities of color. Recent attention has focused on how structural inequities weaken protective factors that help keep communities healthy and safe. Spikes in community violence seen in Chicago since the COVID-19 pandemic further expose the lack of social service, health care, economic, and political safety nets in low-income communities and the apparent dearth of faith in those systems.

The authors contend that a comprehensive, collaborative approach to violence prevention that prioritizes treatment and community partnerships is needed to address social determinants of health and structural characteristics that often provide the context for interpersonal violence. One strategy to address decreasing faith in systems like hospitals is foregrounding frontline paraprofessional prevention workers who possess cultural capital based on their experiences navigating interpersonal and structural violence. Hospital-based violence intervention programs help professionalize these prevention workers by providing a framework for patient-centered crisis intervention and assertive case management. The authors describe how the Violence Recovery Program (VRP), a multidisciplinary hospital-based violence intervention model, leverages the cultural capital of credible messengers to use teachable moments to promote trauma-informed care to violently injured patients, assess their immediate risk for reinjury and retaliation, and connect them to wrap-around services to help aid comprehensive recovery.

Violence recovery specialists have engaged over 6,000 victims of violence since the program's launch in 2018. Three-quarters of patients expressed social determinants of health needs. Over the past year, specialists have connected over one-third of engaged patients to mental health referrals and community-based social services.

High violence rates in Chicago limited case management opportunities in the emergency room. In fall 2022, the VRP began to establish collaborative agreements with community-based street outreach programs and medical-legal partnerships to address structural determinants of health.