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Suicide is a particularly big problem in rural communities.
In western North Carolina and Appalachia, we are certainly in
a rural area.
We know that the suicide rates continue to steadily climb.
They are especially problematic for young people.
We've got to do something.
The Injury-Free NC Academy is our workforce development
initiative in North Carolina.
And we held a session to focus on suicide prevention to enable
teams from communities that were interested and ready to address
suicide to help them advance their work in their community.
So CDC's core injury funding is a foundational funding
for our program.
The Core Injury Funding Program helps us establish a base
to be able to work with a very wide range and diverse
group of partners.
CDC supported the Injury-Free Academy,
and that really served as the genesis for the CALM program.
CALM stands for Counseling on Access to Lethal Means.
It's a relatively new approach to more traditional forms of
suicide prevention, and it focuses around reducing
people's access to the most dangerous methods of suicide
when they're in crisis.
They're doing great work in the state.
We would not have had that program in North Carolina
if it hadn't been for the academy experience.
Injury Prevention, CDCÕs Injury Center.
The Core State Violence and Injury Prevention Program
partnership with the Injury Control Research Centers
is critical so that we can generate knowledge that helps to
advance the field of injury and violence prevention.
These partners bring different perspectives,
and both are critically important.
So, we need to have that big-picture view of
what is working, what the research tells us,
but we also need that practical side of it.
And our practitioners know what's likely to work
in their region.
They know what the priorities are of the populations that
we're really trying to address with these groups.
And it's critical that both research is informing practice
and that practice is informing research.
The Injury Control Research Center funding that we receive
from CDC allows us to do so much more—
to do a study that actually has an impact and to take the
information that we create from our research and distribute it
to the community so that they can use it.
I have no doubt that lives have been saved through this.
I think it really sets the tone for establishing, you know,
evidence-based practices that fundamentally,
not just to start the process, but to sustain it.
It's all about safety.
And I think everyone can get behind that.
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