Presenter Profile
Kirsten Bechtel, MD
Professor of Pediatrics and of Emergency Medicine
Yale School of Medicine
kirsten.bechtel@yale.edu
Dr Bechtel is a Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Bechtel is Medical Director, Pediatric Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner (SAFE) Program; Chairperson, Yale Traffic Safety Subcommittee; Co-Chairperson, State of Connecticut Child Fatality Review Panel; and Principal Investigator, Injury Free Coalition for Kids at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital.
Dr. Bechtel’s academic career has focused on the social welfare and medical well-being of children and injury prevention. Her clinical research has focused on the evaluation of children with head trauma; the prevention of Abusive Head Trauma, recognition of Child Abuse and neglect by emergency medical service providers; the evaluation of children and adolescents after Sexual Assault; the evaluation of children and adolescents who are involved in Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking; the prevention of Traffic Injury; and the prevention of Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms in children with traumatic injury.
She currently serves as an Executive Committee Member for the AAP Section on Child Death Review and prevention. She also serves on the Editorial Boards of AAP Grand Rounds and for AAP PREP-EM. She has extensive experience in writing policy, technical and white papers on child health and injury prevention. She was honored by Yale University with the Seton Elm Ivy Award in 2015 for her work to prevent traffic injury. She was honored by the Department of Pediatrics with the Ather Ali Award for Humanism in Medicine in 2020, and honored by the Yale School of Medicine with the David Leffell Award for Clinical Excellence in 2021.
Presentations
The Struggle is Real: Starting and Maintaining a Firearm Safe Storage Program at Your Institution
Isabell Sakamoto, MS, CHES
Lindsay Clukies, MD, FAAP
Sofia Chaudhary, MD
Sandy McKay, MD
Kirsten Bechtel, MD
Best practices from the literature suggest that providing locking and storage devices to parents who are firearm owners is helpful in promoting safe firearm storage, especially during a behavioral health crisis in their child. This may reduce the likelihood of future injury or death from a firearm. However, many children’s hospitals do not have such programs in place. This workshop aims to help participants learn from program managers who have successfully started such programs at their institutions so that barriers and facilitators to program success can be disseminated amongst workshop participants. Additionally, workshop leaders will assist participants in drawing up a preliminary plan to initiate a firearm safety program at their respective institutions.
1. Understand the rationale for programs that provide locking and storage devices to parents who are firearm owners.
2. Develop program goals, values, and mission and identify key messaging to meet the needs of the community/institution.
3. Become familiar with barriers and facilitators to a program initiation within a hospital system (e.g., political, administrative, financial).
4. Determine who your key stakeholders are to initiate and sustain a program.
5. Learn how to engage with legal leadership at your institution.
6. Learn what various distribution mechanisms are available (e.g., community events, patient bedside, outpatient and inpatient settings, Emergency Department, universal hospital screening, at-risk screening).