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1st appeared 23 September 1998 Live Video Conference Tomorrow on Violence Prevention UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center will host the second of six nationwide video teleconferences tomorrow (Sept. 24) aimed to prevent violence that damages the lives of children and their families. Educators, community leaders, doctors, parents, teens and police from San Francisco and the Bay Area will join in the teleconference as a prelude to a discussion of a community response to violence in the media. The teleconference will be held at Herbst Hall, UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center, part of UCSF Stanford Health Care. Registration begins at 8:45 a.m. and the live national satellite teleconference begins at 9:30 a.m. A panel discussion entitled "Is Media Imitating Life or is Life Imitating the Media?" will begin at 1:30 p.m. The morning teleconference will be a live, interactive training program linking 60 sites nationwide. Led by representatives of the national group Partnerships for Preventing Violence, participants will learn techniques to build community coalitions to address violence. More than 2,000 people at 40 sites joined the first Partnerships for Preventing Violence training session, held May 13, 1998. During the afternoon discussion session at UCSF Mt. Zion, local participants will discuss how parents, teachers, youth and community organizations can act together to address the problem of violence in the media. Members of the audience will be invited to talk with a panel of discussants, to include parents, students, and representatives of the San Francisco schools and the Department of Public Health. UCSF/Mount Zion is hosting the teleconference as part of its long-standing collaboration on violence prevention with groups in San Francisco and particularly in the hospital's Western Addition neighborhood. The UCSF/Mount Zion Violence Prevention Project (MZVPP) was founded in 1995 by pediatricians and pediatric social workers. "We decided to work intensively with families who are attempting to deal with violence in their lives, as a way of preventing injuries, trauma and the devastating emotional effects of being witnesses to domestic and community violence," said pediatric social worker Joanne Ruby, interim director of the program. "The physical, psychological and financial costs of violence for our individual patients and society as a whole are staggering," said Margaret McNamara, chief of Pediatrics for UCSF/Mount Zion and one of the founders of the violence prevention program. "Just as we promote the use of child car seats or seat belts and bicycle helmets, many physicians see violence as a public health problem of epidemic proportion which would be best addressed through prevention rather than reacting after the fact." The program has several components. PATHWAYS (People Allied to Help Western Addition Youth Succeed) is a family support program which provides crisis intervention and therapy for families whose children have been affected by violence. A parent education series emphasizes building self-esteem in children and positive discipline techniques with a focus on alternatives to physical punishment. MZVPP also works in partnership with the Western Addition Health and Wellness Collaborative, which concentrates on the health and well-being of children in local schools, and with the Western Addition Crime Abatement Committee. "Violence is pervasive in society today. It takes a community-wide strategy to respond," Ruby said. That is why the UCSF/Mount Zion Violence Prevention Project has linked up with Partnerships for Preventing Violence, a coalition of the Harvard School of Public Health, the Berkeley-based Prevention Institute, and the Education Development Center in Boston. The Sept. 24 teleconference, transmitted by satellite by the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications, is the second of six training sessions planned over the next three years to help local communities develop violence prevention programs. For national statistics about violence and more information about the national Partnership for Preventing Violence, see the Violence Prevention Program web site at www.mcet.edu/partnerships/ Source: Abby Sinnott and Janet Basu, News Services |
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