Hospital’s Cradle-to-Grave Program Honored
A few years ago it was not uncommon to hear hospitals and vendors for that matter refer to a “cradle-to-grave” concept in health care. The thinking went that you are born at the hospital and through the use of technology the hospital would be there and have your entire medical record from birth to death.
An anti-violence program in Philadelphia is taking a different twist on “cradle to grave,” and for those of you who do not live in the mid-Atlantic region, I thought this story was compelling and decided to write about it.
According to a recent report in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Scott Charles was recognized a few weeks ago by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) as one of 10 recipients of its Community Health Leaders Award. Charles and the Temple University Hospital program will share a $125,000 award. Charles was recognized for his work to prevent violence in a city that has its share of homicides.
Ten successful nominees will each receive awards in the amount of $125,000 consisting of a $20,000 personal award for the leader and $105,000 for a project at the leader’s affiliated organization. The leaders were honored at a celebration event where they are introduced to RWJF staff, national program office (NPO) staff, and RWJF Community Health Leaders recognized in previous years. Each leader also receives technical assistance and guidance aimed at enhancing their leadership skills and building capacity within their communities and organizations.
Paying attention
What caught my attention about Charles’ work is that the anti-violence program is a graphic representation of what really happens during and after a gunfight, a counterpoint to a culture dripping with bloody violent video games and gunplay in movies, so prominent in today’s culture.
Charles, who came to Philadelphia in the late 1990s to complete his bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has reached more than 2,000 Philadelphia youth through the “Cradle to Grave” program, a three-hour presentation that follows the story of teenager, Lamont Adams, who was gunned down in 2004 in North Philadelphia after a dice game.
Charles, who is trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, leads the “Cradle to Grave” program he developed with Amy Goldberg, a trauma surgeon, to prevent violence among inner city teens at one of Philadelphia’s busiest trauma centers. Charles takes student participants, aged 12 to 18, through a reenactment of the final day of Adams’ life -- from the moment he arrives at the trauma center with 14 gunshot wounds, to when his lifeless body is being wheeled into the morgue. The program’s goal is to show the real-life impact of getting shot -- not just the media images on TV or those in movies.
You can see how moved the students were and what an impact it had on them,” Goldberg said in a Philadelphia Weekly article by Kia Gregory in May 2007. Goldberg said the hospital wanted to go beyond its grim routine of patching up gunshot victims and try to reach out to the community to prevent gun violence.
Direct intervention
Charles also intervenes directly with gunshot patients while they’re recuperating in the hospital, because they have a one in seven chance of being shot again. The program is a model for other trauma centers since it works to heal patients physically and spiritually.
Charles told the Inquirer recently that the program tries to “compel kids to see what goes on when you're shot -- anything to countervail the influences that encourage them to pull out a gun or engage in hostilities.”
Type “guns” or “gun violence” into video sharing Web site, YouTube, and you get spoofs of gun violence by teenagers (I wonder, why do they do this stuff?), “bloody” Star Wars spoofs with light sabers and pictures of a guy waving a rifle from his front porch. All of this is available to today’s youth via the Internet, 24/7. There are snippets from video games on YouTube, too, including Grand Theft Auto 4, with several videos captioned "Grand Theft Auto IV - Best Death Moments." We are so isolated from death that we think it’s all a game and even rate the best death scenes in videos.
I recently attended the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, which portrays Medieval life and culture, and prior to the joust there was an announcement to the audience about how there would be scenes of graphic violence. A teenager in the audience yelled at the top of his lungs, “Yeah, violence! I love violence!” A few people looked at this young man with a horrified look, including a woman sitting next to him, who appeared to be his mother. How embarrassing.
There are also some straight news reports on YouTube from television news, reporting on gun violence from a number of communities across the United States.
From August 2007 to July 2008, there were 334 murders in Philadelphia, according to reports in The Philadelphia Inquirer
Here are other statistics on gun violence America:
- Every day more than 80 Americans die from gun violence, according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
- The rate of firearm deaths among kids under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
- American kids are 16 times as likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries, the CDC reported.
In a May 2007 Philadelphia Weekly article, author Kia Gregory writes about Charles:
Trauma surgeons call escaping near death from a gunshot wound as a good save. Charles does not see it that way.
"We have to quit being content with that,” he said. “The only time it’s a good save is if he walks out less likely to get shot or shoot someone. If you only patch him up, you haven’t given him a second chance at life but a second chance at death.”
"We were impressed with his [Charles] passion and commitment to kids," Janice Ford Griffin, the RWJF award's national program director, told the newspaper.
The human dimension
Maria Kefalas, who leads the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, brings her students to Charles’ program each semester to put a human dimension on their studies of crime statistics and homicide rates.
He [Charles] does in an hour what I can't do in 14 weeks," Kefalas, who nominated Charles for the national award, told the Inquirer. He is a tour guide on “what it’s like to be a 16-year-old kid bleeding to death, with doctors cutting off your clothing while your grandmother is screaming in the next room.”
Based on a survey that measures attitudes toward guns and violence, the youth who have participated in the program express less desire to resort to violence, Charles told the newspaper. He hopes that some of the award money will be used to conduct further studies to determine the program's effectiveness.