GVPanorama: This Researcher Is Changing How Rural Gunshot Victims Access Care
The story of Arkansas’s first hospital-based violence intervention program
Public health researcher Dr. Nakita Lovelady (Photo: Joshua Asante, The Trace)
In today’s GVPanorama, we learn the story of Dr. Nakita Lovelady, a young woman from Arkansas who has turned her personal experiences within the increasing gun violence of her state into holistic violence intervention work.
As this article, originally from The Trace, explains, “She grew up near Helena-West Helena, in Phillips County…. From 2018 to 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Phillips had the highest per capita firearm homicide rate of any other county in the United States, rural or urban. Gun violence was part of life growing up, Lovelady recalled, but it’s worse now. “If I don’t know the person who was shot,” she said, “I went to the school with one of their relatives.”
“In 2023, years into her academic research and grappling with the new reality, Lovelady established Arkansas’s first hospital-based violence intervention program, Project Heal, one of the first of its kind in the country to be housed in an urban center but extend its services to rural communities throughout the state.”
Check out the full article here.
Some programs throughout the country could be missing, especially if they are new or independent, this map includes programs that are establishing services but have garnered funding for research and implementation. Graphs via The Trace.
