At a glance
These success stories, California and New Mexico: Using Shared Risk and Protective Factor Trainings for Injury Prevention, highlight how Core SIPP implements, evaluates and disseminates injury prevention strategies into action.
California
What did California do?
The California Core State Injury Prevention Program (Core SIPP) team created a webinar called "Shared Risk and Protective Factors: The Future of Injury and Violence Prevention Work!" The webinar occurred in the summer of 2022, and highlighted work from Oregon and Safe States Alliance subject matter experts. The goal of the webinar was for California Department of Public Health's (CDPH) Injury and Violence Prevention Branch (IVPB) staff to:
- Gain a basic understanding of the shared risk and protective factor (SRPF) approach for injury prevention
- Understand the value of using a SRPF approach with their resources and programs and support the health department's focus on incorporating health equity, using an anti-racist lens, and aligning with California's public health priorities
- Learn how other states use a SRPF approach to improve outcomes in injury and violence prevention
This activity connected California injury prevention staff with resources from the Safe States Alliance and other state partners. The webinar helped lay a foundation for California staff to advance injury and violence prevention work through a SRPF approach. California Core SIPP continues to use the SRPF webinar recording to help direct new staff.
What was the impact of the webinar?
California's Core SIPP team administered a six-question follow-up survey to injury prevention staff to guide future SRPF efforts. The data from the survey will help a new workgroup continue the team's SRPF growth, learning, and implementation in their programs. The webinar:
- Encouraged collaboration and strengthened relationships the Oregon state public health department and other SRPF subject matter experts
- Created a basic SRPF understanding for their branch
- Solidified plans to create a branch wide SRPF workgroup (which kicked off in May 2023) to incorporate this new knowledge into injury and violence prevention work. Future meetings are planned for the coming year.
Why did they create the webinar?
CDPH wanted to incorporate a SRPF approach into all injury and violence prevention work. Including a SRPF approach aligns with CDPH's priorities to advance population health equity through social determinants of health, anti-racism, and trauma-informed decisions. CDPH found that IVPB staff had different levels of familiarity with SRPFs. This led the Core SIPP team and CDPH leadership to create a webinar that introduced all IVPB staff to the SRPF approach. The intended audience was IVPB staff who are responsible for a variety of violence prevention and unintentional injury prevention programs and surveillance activities.
New Mexico
What did New Mexico do?
New Mexico Core State Injury Prevention Program (SIPP) developed an introductory training for the New Mexico Injury Prevention Coalition (NMIPC) and partners on shared risk and protective factors (SRPFs), injury prevention, and the social ecological model (SEM). The University of New Mexico Prevention Research Center, NMIPC, and the New Mexico Department of Health staff helped develop the training, which took place on National Injury Prevention Day in November 2022. The training raised awareness and improved knowledge of how the SRPF approach can apply to injury prevention. Objectives of the training included describing risk factors and general causes of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), and motor vehicle crashes (MVCs). New Mexico Core SIPP created a pre- and post-test to evaluate how well participants understood SRPFs and the SEM before and after the presentation. New Mexico Core SIPP developed the training based on analysis of the pre-test and evaluated the training based on the post-test. The training also provided an opportunity to discuss injury prevention in New Mexico using a SRPF approach.
What was the impact of the training?
Mexico Core SIPP sent out a pre- and post-test survey to the 50 registered participants. A total of 37 participants responded to the pre-test, and 28 responded to the post-test. Only 21% of participants strongly agreed that they understood shared risk factors and 13% strongly agreed that they understood shared protective factors for injury prevention before the presentation. All participants reported a better understanding of the concept of shared risk and protective factors following the presentation. Each survey participant found the presentation useful to their work. Participants had diverse ideas of the shared risk and protective factors that they found most important to address. Participants prioritized improving access to safe childcare, mental health services, and economic opportunities and reducing access to alcohol at community events.
Why did they create the training?
The SRPF approach helps injury prevention professionals to build on the protective factors already in place while focusing on reducing specific risk factors for New Mexico communities. New Mexico faces many challenges to improve injury outcomes. These challenges include high rates of poverty, including children living in poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and high rates of ACEs. New Mexico Core SIPP decided to move injury prevention efforts away from individual level outcome-based approaches towards SRPF approaches. SRPF approaches have the potential to impact multiple outcomes. New Mexico also has a centralized Public Health System that relies heavily on partners to carry out health programs. These partners generally focused on individual level outcomes, and New Mexico Core SIPP recognized a need for injury-related SRPF and SEM education for all staff and partners. The CDC Core SIPP funding provided a concrete way to provide training on these approaches to staff and state partners.