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From the Front Row: The safe storage of firearms and preventing pediatric injuries

Published on November 18, 2022

**This episode contains discussion of difficult topics that may make some listeners uncomfortable, including gun violence and suicide.**

Today, Anya welcomes pediatric emergency medicine physician Dr. Chuck Jennissen from the Stead Family Department of Pediatrics at the University of Iowa. They discuss the safe storage of firearms to prevent childhood injury and death.

Anya Morozov:

Hi everyone, it’s Anya. Before getting into today’s episode, I wanted to let you know that we do discuss content that may be distressing, including suicide in this episode. Please take care of yourself when deciding how or if you would like to take a listen. I also wanted to take this time to highlight the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can always call or text 988 or go to 988lifeline.org for more information. With that, here’s today’s episode.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to From the Front Row, today’s National Injury Prevention Day. And on this day, there are many different types of injuries we can bring awareness to, including sports injuries, agricultural injuries, motor vehicle injuries, and more. This year, the Injury Prevention Research Center is highlighting the importance of safe storage of firearms. We have Dr. Chuck Jennissen, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the Stead Family Department of Pediatrics on the show to do just that.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field of public health. Welcome to the show, Dr. Jennissen.

Chuck Jennissen:

Hi, Anya.

Anya Morozov:

So before we get to the topic of today’s episode, can you talk to us a little bit about your journey to injury prevention? What motivates you to do the work you do today?

Chuck Jennissen:

Well, as a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I soon realized that so many of the really bad things that happen to children were related to injuries, and more people die of–and children die of–injuries than anything else under 44 years of age. So as a physician, if you really want to decrease the number of people dying and children dying, you really need to do something about injuries and preventing them from happening to begin with.

In the emergency department, there’s not often where there’s a case where you can intervene and be the main difference whether they live or die for kids. With these injuries, the most important thing is preventing them from happening to begin with. And so I think it’s really an important part of my career is to do something about preventing injuries in children in particular. And so that’s driven me to get involved with this in my career.

Anya Morozov:

That makes a lot of sense. Here in public health, we definitely like to tout prevention as a way to keep kids out of the emergency department in the first place.

Chuck Jennissen:

You have parents and you see parents who are crying and upset with their death of their child. And as bad as that is losing a child, it’s really the family that goes on with having to live with that loss, which is a real terrible thing. So it’s really important to try to prevent these things from happening to begin with. And a lot of us, we don’t always take the time to make certain the safety precautions that are necessary.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, there’s a lot of weight to the prevention work. So moving specifically to firearm injuries, can you talk a little bit about how common firearm injuries are in the US and why the issue of safe storage of firearms is so important?

Chuck Jennissen:

Well, I think pretty much everybody knows that the United States has more firearms than any other country, and that’s related to children’s deaths from firearms as well. If you look at unintentional and suicide death rates on kids five to 14 years of age, we’re about 12 times that of any other industrial country. For kids that are zero to four years of age, our firearm related deaths are 33 times that of most other industrialized countries. So this is a thing that a lot of other countries don’t deal with, and a lot of that is because we have firearms readily available in the homes, and when they’re not secure that can make problems.

We have increasing numbers of teens and young children dying from firearm related suicides. Suicides in 10- to 19-year-olds is basically the second leading cause of the death next to motor vehicle crashes, and a good chunk of these are executed through firearms. So we know that that’s one of the biggest risk factors to suicide is access to a firearm. It triples your risk of death by suicide whenever you have somebody who has suicidal ideation, making certain they don’t have access to a firearm is critical.

Unintentional deaths are also a big issue. A lot of people have firearms for protection in the home, but there’s clearly studies show that having a firearm in the home is much more likely to kill someone in the family or a friend or neighbor than someone who’s an intruder. And so having these firearms secured are such an important thing. Even the National Rifle Association, the NRA, feels that responsible gun ownership is that you prevent unauthorized use of your firearm by others and so safely securing firearms so they can’t be in reach of children is important. I think there’s some studies suggest that about a quarter of kids have access to a firearm in their home and in Iowa it might be higher than that based on some of the studies we’ve done.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, wow. That’s a lot of really staggering statistics that I was not aware of, especially having a gun in your home is possibly more likely to kill someone in the family than an outside intruder. That’s pretty poignant. And then, like you said, as far as the number of firearms in the home or just the number of homes with firearms, the fact that there’s around 25% of children with access is pretty, that’s a pretty large number.

Chuck Jennissen:

Actually, I was looking at the stats right here, actually, I estimate about one third of homes that children have a firearm present. So an estimation of approximately almost 5 million children live in homes with firearms stored unlocked and loaded. It’s not surprising that we have a higher rate of unintentional firearms in children than most other countries.

Anya Morozov:

So on that topic, last year, you and your research team actually published an article called Firearm Exposure and Storage Practices in the Homes of Rural Adolescents. Can you talk more about what your team did in this article and what you found?

Chuck Jennissen:

Yeah, so FFA, formally called Future Farmers of America, but now it’s just FFA, is a national organization that have local chapters in schools across the country. And we did a survey of FFA members at the Iowa State Leadership Conference in 2019. In that survey we asked a number of questions about firearms, and particularly we were interested in firearm storage. These are mostly high school students that live in rural towns across Iowa, list over half of them are living on farms, but also half live in the country, but not on a farm or in a small town. But most of them are in rural areas. And we asked them whether they had a rifle or shotgun in their home, and 84% of them had a rifle or shotgun in the home. Didn’t surprise me, I grew up on a dairy farm in Central Minnesota, and pretty much everyone I knew had a rifle or shotgun in their home, what was more surprising to me was that 58% of the FFAers that completed the survey had a handgun in their home. When I was a kid, I don’t remember really virtually anybody that had a handgun that I knew of anyway, so that’s I think something that probably has changed a bit over time.

We asked a bit about their storage as well, and a lot of the homes, the rifles were stored unlocked, over half of them were stored unlocked, 51%. 29% of the FFAers said that the rifles, shotguns in their home were stored loaded. And 17%, almost a fifth of them said that they had firearms that were stored, both unlocked and loaded at least some of the time. So these are firearms that easily younger children could have unintentional access to or someone having suicidal ideation could get access to and kill themselves.

I remember one case that I had in the emergency department was a 11 year old boy and really had… No one knew of him having any problems with mental health or suffering suicidal ideation, and he apparently must have had a bad day at school or something. He came home, was able to get access to the handgun that was kept in the home and shot himself and died from it. Perhaps 15 seconds or a minute later maybe that wouldn’t, if he didn’t have that ready access, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. It is just that kids are so impulsive that just having a loaded firearm or firearms that are unlocked but have ammunition available, they get access to that and load it themselves. It’s just such a scary thing.

And mental health, I think in young people, if anything, we’re seeing more and more young people struggling with mental health. We’ve seen that, especially through COVID. It seems like that’s gotten worse. And so having ready access to a firearm that’s not secured is a big concern.

Similarly, maybe not even unexpectedly, homes that had handguns in the home had even higher percentages that were stored either unlocked, loaded or unlocked and loaded than they had for rifles and shotguns. A lot of that is because a lot of people have handguns for protection, and so they sometimes have a little higher likelihood of not having them secure so they can have ready access to them. But of course, that puts other people at maybe greater risk to use them when they shouldn’t be.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, it’s one thing to hear national statistics about the number of firearms, but hearing it specifically in Iowa, which was what you did through this article, is a whole different story. And then your personal stories of being in the emergency department and seeing the potential outcomes of this really highlights the importance of safe storage of firearms. One thing I was curious about, that might be a bit of a tangent, do you know why the percentage of people with handguns has maybe gone up?

Chuck Jennissen:

That’s a good question. There certainly has been a increasing proportion of people that feel that having a handgun or firearms for protection is important to them. And I think that has a lot to do with this increasing presence of handguns in the home.

Anya Morozov:

Okay. So your study was in rural adolescents and you found that a lot of kids in rural areas also have access to firearms that are stored unsafely. Can you talk a little bit about how this compares to urban areas?

Chuck Jennissen:

Well, we ourselves didn’t look at urban areas, but we do know that across the country, the presence of firearms in the home is much lower than that percentage that we found in these rural Iowa FFAers. We were just talking about a third of homes of children have a firearm present across the country overall, so a lot of that doesn’t involve homes that don’t have children, so it’s a little hard. But we do know that firearm ownership is certainly higher in rural areas than urban areas overall.

Anya Morozov:

And I think that also the importance of safe storage practices is magnified when you think about the travel constraints. When you have an emergency in a rural area, it’s going to take a lot longer to get someone from a farm to an emergency room than it is somebody in an urban area probably.

Chuck Jennissen:

Yeah, we have done some studies looking at that here at the University of Iowa. Access to EMS can make a big difference as far as survival from serious injuries from agricultural equipment to all kinds of other factors that play an important part. But as we said, the main thing is to prevent these from happening to begin with. So obviously safe storage is an important aspect of this. We consider safe storage is with having the firearms locked and unloaded and that ammunition is stored separately from the firearm. That’s the ideal way to secure the firearms and the ammunition. The problem with this is that the very safest methods are often fairly expensive, or it can be expensive. Gun safes, for example, can be many hundreds of dollars, can even go up to thousands of dollars potentially. But there are other options.

Most of the time people can find a option for storage that meets their needs. Storage for a lot of firearm owners is not only to secure them from unauthorized use by others, but also to prevent them from getting damaged and prevent them from being stolen. And so these are other reasons that firearm owners want to have good, safe places to store their firearms. People have to figure out what’s the best way for them. But whatever method they can do that they can do reliably each and every time is important.

Some of the cheapest ways to do it is using a cable gun lock. The problem with these is that using a bolt cutter, for example, you can cut the cable. And so somebody, a adolescent who wanted to get access to that, even with a cable gun, if they had access to a bolt cutter, probably could get access to it. And so that may not be adequate to really protect your firearm from unauthorized use in that sense.

Certainly a lot of rural Iowans, adolescents go hunting and their parents may even let them know what the code is or have access to the key, or there’s a combination to that method that they’re storing them in, and that’s not going to prevent them from potentially having access if they do feel suicidal or something. So parents should obviously not share that ability to access their gun cabinet, whatever they have for storing their firearm safely, they shouldn’t be sharing that with their adolescents in their home. So there’s lots of different things for firearm owners to consider when they’re wanting to secure their firearm safely in their home, prevent access to their adolescents or their younger children that might be in the home.

Anya Morozov:

I think it’s definitely a really sensitive topic, and suicidal ideation might be one of those things that you think, “Oh, it’s not going to happen to me or to my adolescent,” or something. But as you mentioned in the case you talked about earlier, there were very few indications that the person had suicidal ideation, but it sounds like it’s still important to make sure that you keep the guns secure anyway.

Chuck Jennissen:

So often I see families come in with their teenager who now has suicidal ideation, and they have many times no idea. Even if you have adolescents who think are mentally healthy, it still doesn’t hurt to make certain that your firearms are secure. You just never know when something like this could happen. And it’s something you can never go back on if it happens. It’s well worth for families to invest some money into having a place to safely store firearms in their home.

Anya Morozov:

Moving on to hopefully a bit of a lighter scenario. If you could wave a magic wand and make some broad changes to reduce pediatric injuries caused by firearms, what would these changes be?

Chuck Jennissen:

Well, a lot of firearm owners are not really in agreement with having laws passed to force them to secure firearms in their homes. There is child access prevention or cap laws that have been passed in many states. The laws have been passed in different states, but they really are quite different as far as what is considered a problematic or not and what the penalties are and so forth. But we do know that cap laws are very effective in decreasing child and adolescent firearm related deaths and injuries.

There’s a lot of firearm related safety laws that we don’t have a lot of evidence that they make that much difference, but we do know that cap laws do make a difference. And so even if we don’t have child access prevention laws that are passed, which I think is a very good and reasonable thing to do, I think that for firearm owners to take responsibility themselves and to make certain that their firearms cannot be accessed by those who would have unauthorized use of them is so important. And like I said, this is something that the National Rifle Association is really in complete agreement with. They may not be in agreement with the laws being passed, but they do feel that firearm owners should be responsible for their firearms and preventing that unauthorized use of those firearms from others.

Anya Morozov:

So even if it’s not a law or something, just making sure it’s something that communities and families prioritize and talk to each other about making sure guns are stored safely.

Chuck Jennissen:

Exactly. Like I said, I grew up on a dairy farm and we had firearms in our home. My dad was pretty good about locking them and preventing access from us getting access to them. So that would be a thing, if I wish, would everybody who has firearms to secure them safely unloaded and with ammunition stored elsewhere.

Anya Morozov:

So then you mentioned a few things about gun safes being the best option for practically going about improving gun safety in rural homes. Are there any other ways you think people could practically go about improving gun safety in rural homes?

Chuck Jennissen:

We talked a bit about storage and I think one of the things where people want to have access for protection, being able to get quick access to it, and there are some good options for firearm owners to have biometric cases and things like that, things that they can get quick access within seconds, and so that certainly is something that firearm owners who have that intention should look into.

Anya Morozov:

And what’s a biometric case?

Chuck Jennissen:

So that’s actually where basically they have fingerprint or palm print access based on that.

Anya Morozov:

Wow.

Chuck Jennissen:

So only you can get into it, but you can also get into it very quickly. That is a reasonable way for firearm owners who want to have their handgun for protection to have quick access to them, but still secure them safely rather than having it unlocked in a drawer and loaded where children in the home could get access to it. One of the things that the American Academy of Pediatrics is promoting is the ASK campaign. I don’t know, have you heard of that?

Anya Morozov:

I have not heard of that.

Chuck Jennissen:

So the ASK campaign, ASK stands for Asking Saves Kids, and basically this is trying to encourage families to talk to where their kids play or visit to ask if they have firearms in the home and whether they’re secure or not. Just like you might share information about Johnny has a allergy to peanuts or things like that. So asking about whether they have any firearms in the home and if they’re secure. And this is kind of a difficult thing, I think for a lot of families to do that, but it makes sense. If you’re very concerned about firearms in your home and you make certain that your firearms are secured safely, why wouldn’t you want to make certain that they go somewhere else and that at least that form of dying there is not present for them or is at least secured?

So I think that’s something that would actually increase the attitudes or the safety culture related to safe storage. If we’re all asking where our kids go, are things stored safely? And that becomes the basic normative behavior that we protect our firearms not only for our own kid, but kids coming. That’s why we secure them, and we expect to have that expectation of others, that might increase what generally people do as far as securing their firearms.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, and it’s a pretty simple question. So if you come at it with that, just curiosity and wanting to make sure that your family and those around you are safe, I think that’s a reasonable ask.

Chuck Jennissen:

I think it’s difficult for many parents to do that, but I think as if it becomes something where people are doing that just as a part of normal interaction, it won’t be as difficult to do. So yeah, that’s the ASK campaign by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Asking Saves Kids.

Anya Morozov:

And the more people who start doing that, the easier it’ll get. Your team, you work specifically in rural areas a lot. So have you found any best practices for outreach about firearm storage or any other injury prevention topics in your work?

Chuck Jennissen:

Well, that’s a good question. We actually are trying to seek funds right now to do a study with focus groups of FFA parents throughout rural Iowa and talking to them about storage issues in their home and what they think about storage, what kind of things would encourage them to change their practices if they’re not securing firearms in their homes? So getting from them, what kind of messaging would be effective? Who should be delivering that message about safe storage? What kind of things do they think they would be willing to change or not change? So I think that’s an important thing, is finding out from rural parents themselves about what they think would work, what kind of things they would be open to.

Talking a little bit more about, even asking others about firearms in the home, finding out what they think about that and what ways they think would be best to help support parents in doing this, and what ways do they think would be good ways to phrase this even. So we’re hoping to do that this coming year and that we hope will help us develop our outreach programs as far as encouragement of safe storage in the homes of rural Iowans, hopefully all Iowans.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, I like the idea of going to hear from the parents themselves about how they feel about this issue and what the best messaging and also action steps would be for them to help make sure their kids are safe.

Chuck Jennissen:

From their standpoint, because a lot of times we might have really good ideas in injury prevention. Professionals may have what we think should work, but that doesn’t always work. You really need to talk to your target audience and find out from them what they think and what they think things are they might be willing to change because sometimes there’s something you think might be important, but they’re saying, almost all people will not do this. They’re not going to change in this way.

Anya Morozov:

And sometimes there’s a particular challenge or something that people face in their daily life that you can’t really know unless you have that lived experience.

Chuck Jennissen:

That’s right. We all live our lives in a different way, and we don’t always have the same kind of experiences. So yeah, that’s critical for any kind of injury prevention efforts is to really find out and talk to the target audience about the issue.

Anya Morozov:

So before we move on to our last few questions, I did want to talk a little bit more broadly about other forms of pediatric injury prevention. Can you talk about some of the other injury prevention work happening at the UIowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital?

Chuck Jennissen:

Sure. We do a lot of injury prevention work. I’ve done a lot particularly related to all terrain vehicles and other off-road vehicles. They’re very popular throughout the country, but certainly here in Iowa and rural areas especially. More kids under 16 years of age die from ATV crashes than die from bicycle related incidents. A lot of people are not aware of that, but this is a significant cause of death for kids. And so we have done a lot of education in the schools with our STARS program.

STARS standing for Safety Tips for ATV Riders. So we’ve done a lot of education related to safe riding. The American Academy Pediatrics actually recommends that no kids under 16 years of age be riding an ATV, but we know that that’s not happening throughout the country. And so what we really want parents and adults to do is to make certain, at least that they’re following certain safety rules related to riding ATVs to help decrease that risk to their child.

We’re doing some work on lawnmowers. We have a family who’s suffered a lawnmower injury where the father actually ran over his son, which is not that uncommon of a problem throughout the country, one of the leading causes of amputations in children in the United States. They formed a group called Tate’s Army, and they’re promoting lawnmower safety and injury prevention. And so the Stead Family Children’s Hospital at the University of Iowa is working with them and trying to help promote lawnmower safety. One of the things that I have been concerned about and I see quite frequently is that people give rides to children on lawn mowers. A lot of adults, grandparents and parents included, don’t always think it’s that big a deal to give a child a ride on a lawn mower just for recreation, and they’re not actually mowing, but unfortunately that trains a child that this is a recreational vehicle that they can get rides on it.

A lot of the young children that are toddlers and so forth, they’re scared of a lawn mower. It’s loud and scary, but once they’ve gotten a ride or two or more on it, all of a sudden it becomes a recreational vehicle and they see grandpa or dad mowing the lawn and they run out to get a ride. And of course, the person mowing the lawn isn’t expecting the child to be right there and they back up or turn around and boom, they run over the child causing a amputation to their lower, usually their lower extremity, the leg. So we’re doing some work related to lawnmower safety, a lot of bike riding rodeos and promotion of bike helmet use. Also passenger safety and kids being correctly placed in car seats and boosters and motor vehicle crashes.

Boy, that’s something that has been just such an impressive success as far as injury prevention from since even when I became a physician in the 1980s. The number of kids I see dying or seriously injured in motor vehicle crashes has just decreased tremendously. Some of that’s because of the safety that’s been engineered in cars, but also it’s definitely the improvement in children being properly secured in cars with car seats and booster seats, and just not getting these type of serious injuries and deaths that we used to see when the likelihood a child’s safely secured in the car of dying is just so low now. It can happen with a really, really bad crash, but boy, it’s getting to be so much more rare than it used to be.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, I know. Now it’s like the norm to when a kid is born in a hospital, don’t they have kind of a-

Chuck Jennissen:

Yeah, it’s from very beginning, from when you leave the hospital, right away, having the child in a rear facing car seat that’s proper for their age. It’s such an important thing, and it’s become the norm. I was talking about changing safety behavior, changing the norm. I think that’s the norm now. If you saw somebody that’s not securing their child, most adults are going to say, “What’s wrong? Why are they not securing their child? That’s dangerous.” So that’s where we need to move the needle for some other safety issues, make that the normative behavior.

Another thing we’re working on is safe sleep. For infants to be on their back in a crib with nothing else around them basically is critical to prevent them from dying from SUID or sudden unexpected infant death. What’s really interesting is that the number of children that die from SUID now under one year of age, that’s about the same as a number of kids who die from motor vehicle crashes under 18 years of age. We think a lot about kids dying from motor vehicle crashes, but that number now is about the same as the kids who are dying of SUID under a year of age. And so safe sleep is a really big thing, I think, for us to try to improve upon and help decrease the number of children that are dying of sudden unexpected infant death.

Anya Morozov:

We’ve talked about ATVs, lawn mowers, bike riding, passenger safety, and safe sleep as potential other issues along with gun safety and safe storage of firearms, which was the main topic today. So with all of that in mind, what’s something you’re excited about for your future work?

Chuck Jennissen:

Unfortunately, there’s no lack of things to pursue and work on and trying to help decrease the number of children dying from injuries. And so I’m excited about all of it that we’ve talked about, and I’m hopeful that we can make changes and that families don’t have to go through a lot of the tragedies that past parents have had to undergo. A lot of times you’ll hear parents saying, “Well, we never wore seat belts when we were little and we survived.” But the thing is, a lot of people did not survive. Just because you did doesn’t mean you weren’t at risk and doesn’t mean that there weren’t other people that died. We know that a lot of these efforts we’ve seen with proper placement of children in car seats and boosters and so forth make a big difference. And the number of kids who are surviving that wouldn’t be here with us if people didn’t do these proper safety things.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, that’s one of the big conundrums is we really do need to value the lived experience in coming up with our solutions to a lot of these problems. But also we’re taking a step back and looking at the overall rates of injuries and things and how we can affect change on those, even though you might not notice it yourself, if the rate of injury goes down, that’s really saving lives and affecting a lot of people.

Chuck Jennissen:

But that’s what the thing about injury prevention, you never know the people you actually save. If you’ve done a good job, you might see that there’s rates or a number of deaths to certain things decrease, but you don’t know who they are and where working in the emergency department, if you’re working on someone, you know who they are, what you’ve done, but in injury prevention, it’s a little more nameless. You put a lot of effort in it and you don’t necessarily see what you’ve accomplished. That’s where I like about the car seats, the death rate is decreased, and we know there’s people that have survived that wouldn’t have if it weren’t for proper seatage and car seats used in cars and so forth and seat belts.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, I couldn’t have said that better myself. So now we’ll move on to the last question that we like to ask of all of our guests. What was one thing you thought you knew but were later wrong about?

Chuck Jennissen:

Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I would say that being a scientist, I think that perhaps I thought that maybe people would change if they knew the facts. If we could tell them, if you just do this and this, and we know that if you do this, it’ll save lives, that, that would be enough to change people’s behavior. It’s important. But what I was wrong about is that it takes a little bit more than that a lot of times.

There’s certainly for injury prevention, sometimes an emotional aspect, knowing somebody or having somebody able to tell their story. People, a lot of times we react the stories a lot better than we do just a fact. It may not be as impressive, but when you hear somebody tell their story, it gets people thinking more. I think there’s a lot of ways that we can do injury prevention more effectively. We need to know the science and we need to know the facts about it. But the delivery and how you get to change people’s behavior and be more safe, that’s something that takes a little bit more than just the facts. And so that’s something I think that I thought I knew, but I was wrong.

Anya Morozov:

Yes.

Chuck Jennissen:

And that’s like where we’re talking about firearms and talking to the parents of adolescents and finding what their views are and what they think would work and what would change people’s opinions. They think of their peers as rural parents of children, adolescents, finding out from them what they think would work best is going to be really important for us to develop an effective program here at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital related to firearm storage.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. Changing behavior and changing norms is very complicated and more complicated than I thought, too coming in. And I think it’s why my friends in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health are going to have jobs when they graduate.

Chuck Jennissen:

What we really want to work is to put ourselves out of jobs. That’s what we really want to do.

Anya Morozov:

Yes, exactly.

Chuck Jennissen:

My job in emergency medicine is to try to see if we can change things so we don’t have any patients to see in the emergency room.

Anya Morozov:

All those folks who were working on car seat safety a few years ago, still work to be done, but I think there’s probably fewer jobs in that area.

Chuck Jennissen:

Always have new families to keep. It helps that there’s some changes in safety norm related to that. But you’re right, it’s still ongoing issue that we have to keep educating. We need to keep these issues in front of people and educate them related to it.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and taking the time to talk to us about injury prevention today. I learned a lot from the conversation, and I can tell you that you’re really passionate about the work that you do.

Chuck Jennissen:

Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Anya Morozov:

And that’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Dr. Chuck Jennissen for joining us today. This episode was hosted, written, edited, and produced by Anya Morozov. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook, and our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can always reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.