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• Become educated in injury prevention, including adolescent assault, relationship violence, homicide, and suicide.
• Encourage training programs to provide undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education in the causes and prevention of violence, the promotion of healthy relationships, and competencies in understanding and working with communities.
• Routinely screen for and counsel patients about violence within relationships, and about firearm safety.
• Regularly screen for and treat or refer patients for help for alcohol and other drug abuse problems.
• Participate in practice-based violence research and advocate for resources to support research, including ongoing public health data collection and surveillance.
• Advocate for and adhere to practice guidelines or protocols for assessing high-risk violence situations and behaviors, appropriate treatment and referrals, and counseling and screening from the prenatal period through adulthood.
• Disseminate information about the root causes, risk factors, and protective factors for relationship violence.
• Add to patient examinations a violence history that addresses exposure to violence; safety/security issues; effects of trauma; attitudes toward weapon carrying, aggression, and fighting; and stressors in the family and community.
• Strengthen the documentation of abuse and histories of family violence in both individual and group records.
• Volunteer to serve local schools as epidemiologists, health care providers, and crisis team members and local community prevention initiatives as mentors, supervisors, and advocates.
• Establish a network of referral services to make it easier for youth and their parents or caretakers to access resources.
• Advocate for public policies and resources to address the sources of violence.

Excerpted from the Commission for the Prevention of Youth Violence. Youth and Violence: Medicine, Nursing and Public Health: Connecting the Dots to Prevent Violence. Chicago, IL : American Medical Association; 200:28.