VIP Approach

The VIP is an intensive hospital-based intervention program that assists victims of intentional violent injury, including gunshots, stabbings, and beatings. Victims receive assessment, counseling, and social support from a multi-disciplinary team to help make critical changes in their lives.

However, the program also recognizes that victims of violence may also be perpetrators of violence. This dynamic plays an important role in the program, but does not interfere with the overlying belief that reaching victims of violence in the hospital setting immediately following a life-threatening or life-changing event is an opportune moment to engage them for intervention. Individuals are not only experiencing a medical crisis at this time, but also social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual crises. This approach also hinges on the reality that health care professionals are frequently the first, and sometimes the only, professionals who have the opportunity to intervene.