A University of New Mexico project that supports rural healthcare providers is taking on a new topic – violence prevention. The new training program is aimed at health professionals as well as legal personnel and educators.
Project ECHO is a program that connects primary care providers in rural and underserved communities with specialists elsewhere to support their work. Otherwise, a patient might miss out on necessary treatment due to the excessive travel and cost of reaching a specialist. And it has expanded its reach to other professions and address a variety of problems, like climate change.
Dr. Joanna Katzman is the medical director of the new violence prevention program. She said contributing factors to violence are numerous, and the training touches on many.
“We're talking about opioids and alcohol and how they contribute to increased violence,” she said. “We're talking about loneliness. We're talking about domestic violence and intimate partner violence and suicide.”
She also said training for medical professionals on how to talk about emotional things with patients is often lacking, and this aims to help them learn those skills.
“You might not have gotten the training before you graduated, but we can give it to you now. We can increase your confidence, and we can provide communication skills,” Katzman said.
That’s a big part of the training’s gun violence aspect. Project ECHO encourages healthcare providers to talk about gun safety with patients, which can be a sensitive conversation.
“It’s really teaching and educating the participants on our session every week to identify where that patient might be in the conversation, meeting the patient where they are,” Katzman said.
The program is already up and running, with almost 300 participants. Most are located in New Mexico, but about a quarter reside elsewhere in the country, and seven are tuning in from abroad.
This coverage is made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and KUNM listeners.
