A Proposal to Establish the Mississippi Violence Injury Prevention (VIP) Program

NIH RePORTER · NIH · UH3 · $4,268,296 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), in partnership with four well-established community groups—People’s Advocacy Institute, Strong Arms of JXN, Operation Good Foundation, and the Mississippi Public Health Institute—propose to participate in the Community Level Interventions for Firearm and Related Violence, Injury and Mortality Prevention (CLIF-VP) Research Network by establishing the Mississippi Violence Injury Prevention (VIP) Program. Together, individual team members represent community activists and several academic disciplines, including emergency medicine, psychology, public health, law, and nursing. Mississippi had the nation’s highest firearm mortality rate in 2020 at 28.6 per 100,000 residents. Jackson, the state’s capital, had a 2021 homicide rate of 97.6 per 100,000 residents, more than three times higher than the state and 15 times higher than the national rate of 6.5 murders per 100,000 residents. UMMC, which is the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the state, administered care to 1,129 patients presenting with injuries from firearms or related violence. As part of the CLIF-VP Research Network, the Mississippi VIP Program will work closely with its Coordinating Center, the other Research Projects funded through this Agreement, the CLIF-VP Research Network’s Stakeholder Board(s), Steering Committee, and workgroups to successfully carry out cross-project activities. The Mississippi VIP Program’s research design includes a two-year planning (UG3) phase and a three-year implementation (UH3) phase. Two specific aims have been identified for the UG3 phase: (1) define and create the machinery to longitudinally monitor the community-level social determinants of firearm injury in the greater Jackson, Mississippi metropolitan area with respect to (a) perceived needs, (b) available resources and their utilization, and (c) opportunities for capacity building; and (2) identify principal community-specific risk elements for (a) firearm injury, (b) suboptimal functional recovery, and (c) retaliation and reinjury, and collaboratively develop linked community- and hospital-based protective resources to address these risks. Two specific aims have been identified for the UH3 phase: (1) conduct a clinical trial that implements optimized community-focused interventions during the UG3 phase using a step-wedge cluster approach, and measures longitudinal community and individual impact of violence prevention interventions on (a) incidence of firearm injury, (b) functional victim recovery, (c) incidence of retaliation and reinjury, and (d) economic impact; and (2) coordinate ongoing community, regional, and telehealth expansion and adoption of optimized community-focused resources in concert with the CLIF-VP Research Network.

Key facts

NIH application ID
10939427
Project number
4UH3MD018298-02
Recipient
UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI MED CTR
Principal Investigator
MATTHEW E KUTCHER
Activity code
UH3
Funding institute
NIH
Fiscal year
2024
Award amount
$4,268,296
Award type
4N
Project period
2022-09-15 → 2027-06-30