“He wanted a way out of that lifestyle, but he just didn’t know how to escape it.”
In his role as a violence intervention specialist at The Johns Hopkins Hospital Break the Cycle-Hospital Violence Intervention Program (JHH BC-HVIP), Nadir Yazid Abdullah engages patients that present with violent injuries, most often gunshot wounds, and uses a trauma-informed approach to offer his patients a new perspective; opportunity for recovery; and, eventually, change. As he describes in his story about “Marcus,” Nadir works closely with patients to understand their realities and the challenges they face on the ground that put them at high risk for future violence involvement or victimization. Through this trauma-informed approach, Nadir is able to present patients with options and connect them to services that can help facilitate de-escalation and divert patients from future harm.
The JHH BC-HVIP is affiliated with The Johns Hopkins Department of Surgery’s Division of Acute Care Surgery and is an example of a hospital-based violence intervention program (HVIP). While HVIPs share common traits, they look different depending on the city and patients they serve. Generally, HVIPs work to identify patients admitted to hospitals and trauma recovery centers who present increased risk of repeat violent injury and to connect them with mental health counseling, community-based resources, and other targeted services to address the underlying risk factors of violence. Unlike other violence intervention models, HVIPs work directly out of or are directly affiliated with hospitals, understanding that patients with increased violent reinjury risk may be more open to receiving help from an intervention specialist during and throughout their care. Successful HVIP models have been found to reduce the violent reinjury rate of patients by 50 percent.
The Johns Hopkins program works with patients from Baltimore, Maryland, ages 15 to 35 who are admitted to the Johns Hopkins Hospital with gunshot or stabbing wounds. The program then matches those patients with a multidisciplinary team of case managers, social workers, violence intervention specialists, and physicians. In fiscal year 2023, of the 130 participants in the program, only 3 percent came back to a Maryland hospital with a new firearm injury within a year of follow-up.