Northwell Marketing Campaign Wants to Normalize The Conversation Around Gun Safety

Chethan Sathya, MD, director of the system's Center for Gun Violence Prevention, shares insights into the campaign and the center's gun violence prevention work.

Only 30% of gun owners who have children at home safely store their firearms, and every day, 13 children are killed by gun violence and another eight are shot by accident, according to research from TK. With guns now the leading cause of children's death in America, Northwell Health is aiming to fix that by ending the stigma around conversations on unlocked guns in the home.

Launched in September and supported by more than one thousand hospitals across the country, the American Hospital Association, the Children's Hospital Association, and the Catholic Health Association of America, the first national gun violence awareness campaign urges parents to ask, "is there an unlocked gun in the house," when dropping off their kids at someone else's home.

The campaign's media channels include print ads— with an ad in the New York Times—15-second national and New York-based television spots, billboards, social media posts, online video, radio public service announcements, a coalition website, and a website for the awareness campaign.

While the campaign is in its infancy, and the organization is still gathering quantitative survey data, they have already seen the campaign make an impact on the system's patients and consumers. In just one month, consumers in the New York market who were exposed to the campaign's "Tiger" television spot were more than three times likely to have asked someone if they had an unlocked gun in the house. They found that 12% of parents who hadn't seen the campaign had asked about unlocked guns, and 38% of those who had seen the campaign had asked.

Chethan Sathya, MD, Director of Northwell's Center for Gun Violence Prevention and pediatric trauma surgeon, recently spoke with HealthLeaders about the campaign and Northwell's continued work against gun violence.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: Why did Northwell launch this national campaign and what is its intended impact?

Chethan Sathya: Our goal with the Center for Gun Violence Prevention has been to normalize the way we talk about gun violence and firearm safety. We do not view this as a political issue. It is the leading cause of death in kids, so it's very much a public health issue and safety issue. At the end of the day, the majority of gun owners in this country are for firearm safety and many folks in this country are for violence prevention.

The healthcare industry has a critical role to play in reframing this as a public health and healthcare issue. And as such, this public awareness campaign goes hand in hand with our philosophy of screening our patients for firearm risk. The purpose is to destigmatize and normalize the way we talk about this topic. We view gun violence risk, or firearm injury risk, no different than we view the risk of heart disease, risk of cancer. When we ask questions about sugar intake, exercise, smoking, substance use, there is no difference in asking from a healthcare lens from asking questions about firearm injury and risk, to access or violence.

Likewise, the campaign is around the fact that we hope to enhance discussions in the community and among parents when they send their kids to other houses. In the same vein that they ask about drowning avoidance, choking hazards, safety gates, other dangerous things in the household, it's okay to ask about guns with the intention to have them safely stored. This is not about taking people's weapons away, it's purely for having  them safely stored, which means locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition.

HL: What reactions have you seen from patients, your community, and other healthcare organizations?

Sathya: We've already been doing this in our healthcare setting for a year or so now; having these conversations with our patients and screening, and the reception there is very, very high.

With respect to this public awareness campaign, which focused more on the consumer and focused more on parents and the community … they're happy to see this. We've seen a tremendously positive impact from this. I can't tell you how many parents have said "this the first time I've thought about it this way." Based on the metrics we are measuring; we're seeing parents starting to have these conversations where they weren't before. It's, in general, being positively reviewed.

There are always going to be folks who think we're doing this for other reasons. And that's also led to a number of exciting opportunities to have a conversation and to educate why we're doing this and why we're not. We almost always are able to find common ground with folks that don't agree with this.

HL: Can you share the continued work the Gun Violence Prevention Center has been doing?

Sathya: I'm a pediatric surgeon. I, unfortunately, treat a lot of kids [who have succumbed to firearm injury] and I come at this from that level. We've seen a 600% increase in our level one trauma center here of bullet wounds in kids this year compared to last year. This is certainly an issue that's front of mind.

When I got here in 2019, I was inspired to see our CEO, Michael Dowling, [make us] one of the first health systems to make an institutional commitment to this issue. If you think about how many hospitals have centers for cancer and centers for heart disease, very few have a center for violence prevention. That's what led to the center, which I direct. We have hundreds of initiatives we focus on targeting a public health approach to this crisis and our initiatives [include] anything from medical education to community work. We work with law enforcement, veterans, community violence prevention organizations, schools. We have NIH research projects, and we have a policy advocacy arm as well.

Our big national push has been bringing health systems and hospitals together to talk about this issue. We think hospitals and healthcare needs to do more prioritizing how we figure this out. We've launched a learning collaborative that focuses on best practices at a grassroots level. There are 600 hospitals that are funded by 13 states. We have a new CEO council that's going to be announced soon that has 45 CEOs of large health systems to make a substantial commitment to the healthcare industry when it comes to this epidemic.

4.6 million children live in households with unsecured guns, and that number has only gone up significantly since COVID-19, with millions of Americans buying guns for the first time. This is an educational effort around firearm safety. A lot of parents are surprised at these risks and surprised that there are simple things that they can do. Locking up their guns could save a life.

Editor's note: This story was updated on December 16.

Related: Northwell Health CEO Addresses Gun Violence Prevention