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Tiffany Davis, Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital
Emergency room treatment is expensive, but there’s one surefire way to drastically lower that cost: Make sure injuries that necessitate trips to the ER never take place.
That’s the job of Tiffany Davis, injury prevention program coordinator at Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital. She’s devoted her career as well as her considerable fundraising and networking skills to either keeping injuries from happening or, in some cases, keeping them from happening again.
“I’m kind of the behind-the-scenes person pulling the strings and creating the relationships that make this work happen,” Davis said. “There’s a lot of other folks that are part of it, too.”
One of her marquee successes was helping to bring a Hospital-linked Violence Intervention Program to Methodist. Launched last spring (with help from a $100,480 Indiana Department of Health Trauma System Development Grant that Davis secured), it serves gunshot victims (and eventually, victims of other forms of violence) by addressing the roots of the particular incident and providing holistic support to patients and their families. The effort, which has already supported roughly 50 individuals, covers a myriad of challenges such as finding emergency housing for the victim, assessing the risk for retaliation and filling food and transportation needs. And even, when applicable, helping patients find work.
“That way, they’re better-supported socioeconomically,” Davis said. “We know that when people have this sort of support, their risk for violence is less.”
Her myriad other projects (and grant initiatives) include the Preventing Older Adult Falls initiative, which covers everything from exercises to build leg strength, to information about medications linked to falls, to empowering participants to speak frankly with their doctors about their concerns over their unsteadiness.
And for the past five years, Davis has taught an undergraduate-level injury prevention course at the Fairbanks School of Public Health and regularly presents informational programs in the community, taking her prevention message to a wider audience. She spends even more time, however, strategizing about future programs and talking to stakeholders who could help make them happen.
“For fall prevention, I have a 2025 goal of working with pre-hospital programs such as mobile integrated health programs and paramedicine, because they’re the ones going into people’s homes when there’s a fall, or doing medical checks,” Davis said. “They can really look at people’s homes and assess the risk for falling.”
Networking is not just a big part of her job but also one of the most enjoyable. In her view, it’s the most practical way for a non-medical person to improve public health. And there’s still lots of room for improvement, given that Methodist’s trauma center, all by itself, treats some 4,000 cases annually, from dog bites to automobile accidents.
“I’m not capable, by myself, of preventing 4,000 injuries a year,” Davis said. “It takes a team. I feel responsible for helping to build that team and build the network that serves the people.”•
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