On a July night in 2011, 16-year-old Jose Ferran was shot in the shoulder. He spent only a few hours in the emergency department of the city's St. Christopher's Hospital for Children before doctors sent him home.
His injury wasn't life threatening, and he'd heal with outpatient therapy.
So he returned to the North Philadelphia neighborhood where he'd been shot, in an ongoing feud between rival "squads" of teenagers in his predominantly middle-class, Hispanic section of the city.
Most hospitals across the country would have been content with treating his physical wounds. At St. Christopher's, though, a group of emergency room doctors and social workers offer more than just standard medical care.
The hospital is part of the city's Healing Hurt People program, or HHP, an ER-based violence intervention program. HHP works on the public health-based notion that violence, like other diseases that spread, can be prevented. It targets services to those at highest risk, patients like Ferran who are being treated for violent injuries in the city's emergency rooms.
Staff members contact patients in the hospital and follow them after their release. Their goals are to treat traumatized minds as well as bodies and to reduce the odds that patients will be hurt again, or hurt others.
[For more of this story, written by Brie Zeltner, go to http://www.cleveland.com/healt...ealing_hurt_peo.html]
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