((music)) We are happy today to announce that we have
decided to fund a collaboration between Creighton University, University of Nebraska Medical
Center and Impact One. Impact One (and they can tell you more about it) intervenes on
a daily basis with families and friends of victims who are brought to the two emergency
rooms in Omaha. We are strongly beginning out efforts in the
community and in the street and our signature work is in intervention at the hospital. What
has been missing in our community for a long period of time (I mean that’s across the
board, but specifically in Northeast and Southeast Omaha) has been issues of hope. We’ve had
a lot of hopelessness in our community and what I think Impact One has done, in conjunction
with the hospitals, in conjunction with a number of our collaborative partners is to
provide hope in the communities. These are baby steps, but these baby steps are starting
to bare fruit and as we build more our collaborations, we’re going to see those baby steps become
giant steps forward, especially with the help of the hospitals and the efforts to collect
data and do research to determine, to really drill down to see what some of the problems
really are and how we, as a collective community get at them.
This is unbelievably unique and at both hospitals at the highest level, both universities together
is very rarely done in the community. Congratulations to them really. We have all the players in
my view at the table to do this. That makes it even more exciting, quite frankly.
When these situations occur and these families come in to the emergency room, there’s a
lot of agitation, there’s a lot of disruption, and the hospital needs to be about doing the
hospital’s business and the staffs need to be comfortable that they can carry out
their medical responsibilities and having this presence there provides a degree of confidence
and comfort to the staff so that they can handle the business of treating these victims
when they come in. What’s different is the completion on our
end of getting through to a lot of the regulatory issues, as well as the research component
to this. I think that was important to go through that growing pain. But this is different,
moving forward is different. The next year’s going to be different than the last year.
We’ve already seen that they’ve taken a lot of the work load off of the emergency
department staff by de-escalating the family and the friends that come into the emergency
department. You can take that worry off of the staff so they have more time to care for
the patients. We’ve had larger success with people that
come in the ER because we actually are out in the communities working with young people
every day. We have a summer jobs program, we hired 250 kids to work for us last year.
So people know Impact One; they know our work and they know they can trust us.
Sometimes the patient’s not ready for change, but what we see with domestic violence and
I think we’ll see with youth violence is you plant the seed. And so today they may
not be so receptive, but next week they might. This is a moment where we are highlighting
violence as a risk for this community in all its forms. Bullying in schools, home-related
violence between intimate partners, violence against children, violence against women,
gun violence in the street; this is a continuum. The more we stand against it as a community,
the more we’re going to be able to overcome it.
We are not going to go away. These hospital institutions, Impact One, our legislature,
the police chief, our police department, all of our collaborative partners; we’re not
going to go away and we’re going to do what is necessary to fix and solve the problems
that they face as best we can given the resources that we have.
My real dream for this project will eventually be to have intervention for the person that’s
punched in the face. Right now, it’s for gunshot wounds, which is really the tip for
every gunshot wound. There’s all sorts of violence. We’re not geared up for that intervention
yet, but I can see that and then even once we understand the risk factors, here’s a
person with strep throat that has the risk factors that we’ve identified, maybe we
could intervene at that point. So this is just the beginning.