Become a member and receive career-enhancing benefits
Our top priority is providing value to members. Your Member Services team is here to ensure you maximize your ACS member benefits, participate in College activities, and engage with your ACS colleagues. It's all here.
Become a member and receive career-enhancing benefits
Our top priority is providing value to members. Your Member Services team is here to ensure you maximize your ACS member benefits, participate in College activities, and engage with your ACS colleagues. It's all here.
Firearm injury continues to plague our country and potential solutions remain a high-profile topic in the national debate. While gun control is clearly a polarizing issue, other approaches to this public health problem may allow us (and perhaps other academic medical organizations) to lead an effort to find a common ground so that progress can be made in addressing firearm violence. American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma (ACS COT) leadership and the Injury Prevention Committee have spearheaded an effort to work together and improve the quality of the conversation around how best to reduce firearm injury.
Principal Investigators: Avery Nathens, MD, PhD, MPH, FACS, FRCPSC, and Deborah Kuhls, MD, FACS, FCCM Co-Investigators: Fred Rivara, MD, MPH, and Ashley Hink, MD, MPH
The ACS COT was awarded a grant from the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research (NCGVR) to study individual and community level risk factors for all firearm injuries treated at TQIP centers. The study aims to understand the circumstances and risk factors of adult and pediatric firearm injuries to identify potential future prevention interventions, and to develop national estimates on the incidence of firearm injuries in the US.
The ACS COT Firearm Study Research Dataset is being provided to researchers and investigators for further research projects using the data collected from this study. It is comprised of 17,395 firearm patients presenting at 128 participating TQIP centers between March 1, 2021, and February 28, 2022. Participating centers had to participate in ACS TQIP over the duration of the study and agreed to collect additional information on firearm injury patients, as defined in the ACS COT Firearm Data Dictionary.
If you would like to use the ACS COT Firearm Study Research Dataset for your analyses, you must first complete our online dataset application. ACS Staff will review your application and follow-up via email within 15 business days after your submission.
Firearm Safety and Injury Prevention Brochures
The Firearm Safety and Patient Health: A Proactive Guide to Protecting Patients and Their Families document from the ACS COT is a Best Practices guide developed for health care providers by firearm-owning surgeons, and intends to help link firearm injury prevention to clinical practice in a practical way. This guide provides information on firearm safety and handling, positive ways in which providers can discuss firearm safety with their patients, and various injury prevention resources which can be utilized by hospitals or the local community.
The Gun Safety and Your Health brochure from the ACS COT is intended for patients and the general public, and offers tips on how you can keep your families and communities safe from firearm injuries and death. Our hope is that all health care providers will make this brochure available to your patients as an opportunity to engage them in discussions around firearm injury prevention and safety.
Press-Quality Files to Add Your Branding for Print
Fill out our form to download the brochure version that allows you to brand with your own logo.
Violence Intervention Programs: A Primer for Developing a Comprehensive Program within Trauma Centers
A group from the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma’s (ACS COT) Injury Prevention and Control Committee was tasked with outlining a comprehensive approach to institute a sustainable hospital-based violence intervention program (HVIP). Below is a step-wise guide to establishing a working HVIP. It describes what is necessary to run a program at minimum, and is followed by an additional piece on resources for a “dream” program. It is intended to guide fledgling programs and perhaps save new programs from the pitfalls that often accompany this difficult work.
A group from the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma’s (ACS COT) Injury Prevention and Control Committee was tasked with outlining a comprehensive approach to institute a sustainable hospital-based violence intervention program (HVIP). Below is a step-wise guide to establishing a working HVIP. It describes what is necessary to run a program at minimum, and is followed by an additional piece on resources for a “dream” program. It is intended to guide fledgling programs and perhaps save new programs from the pitfalls that often accompany this difficult work.
The survey is designed to evaluate ACS COT member attitudes about firearm ownership, freedom, responsibility, physician-patient freedom, and policy with the objective of using survey results to inform firearm injury prevention policy. The following slides and accompanying document summarize the results.
