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Kentucky is negatively affected by high unintentional injury, traffic fatality, child maltreatment rates and risk factors, such as poverty and substance misuse, that increase susceptibility to injury and death.

To help decrease injury morbidity and mortality rates, the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center (KIPRC), as the bona fide agent for the Kentucky Department for Public Health, was awarded a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant under the CDC Core State Injury Prevention Program (Core SIPP) grant announcement. Core SIPP states support infrastructure, data, and partnerships to identify and respond to existing and emerging injury threats with data-driven public health actions. Kentucky is one of 23 states awarded. The funding cycle is for five years.

Through the grant, Kentucky will work to decrease injury morbidity and mortality, focusing on the priority focus areas of adverse childhood experiences, traffic safety, traumatic brain injury, and falls, as well as other emerging injury threats.

 “The Kentucky Violence and Injury Prevention Program (KVIPP) will analyze and monitor injuries across the state to identify disproportionately affected communities; inform the public, stakeholders, and policymakers; and support key partner implementation strategies and new and existing injury violence prevention strategies. Our partners are critical to our success,” said Ashley Bush, DrPH, principal investigator of KVIPP.

The Kentucky Safety and Prevention Alignment Network (KSPAN) is KVIPP’s injury community implementation group. Together they work to produce the state injury and violence prevention plan, collaborate on commonly shared agendas across multi-sectors, and participate in workgroups to identify needs and risk and protective factors, etc., across disproportionately affected populations.

The grant will utilize partnerships to translate actionable data from surveillance, assessment and evaluation to high-impact,  evidence-based and -informed actionable strategies such as the Dias-based PAHT education, Checkpoints teen driver safety program, and traffic sobriety checkpoints to address priority injury areas. KVIPP also will use injury surveillance and program data to inform the public, state and local stakeholders, and policymakers about injury prevention and intervention opportunities.

“We are going to continue to focus on upstream injury and violence prevention strategies to increase protective factors and reduce risk factors using the best available evidence,” said Bush.

KVIPP is part of the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center, which is a unique partnership between the Kentucky Department for Public Health (DPH) and the University of Kentucky’s College of Public Health. KIPRC serves both as an academic injury prevention research center and as a bona fide agent of DPH for statewide injury prevention and control.