A Proposal to Establish the Mississippi Violence Injury Prevention (VIP) Program - PROJECT SUMMARY/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, 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, survey research, GIS and remote sensing, 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.
