Keeping Kids Safe
Many people believe in separating their work from their personal lives, but for Tamera Coyne-Beasley, M.D., M.P.H., the two are hopelessly intertwined -- at least for the moment. Coyne-Beasley, an expert in adolescent health, has a 14-year-old and an 11-year-old of her own. And though she does her best to not take her work home, she can’t help but apply lessons garnered from her research on adolescent health and violence prevention to her own adolescent son and daughter.
“One of the things we know about violence prevention is that parental monitoring is very important,” she said. “Knowing that, how could I not monitor my own children, sit down to dinner with them and do all of the things that are proven to make a difference? I want to be as engaged as possible in the lives of my children, as well as other children that I encounter.”
Earlier in life, Coyne-Beasley’s family played heavily into her decision to become a doctor. She saw a number of her sick relatives treated unfairly, both because they were black and because they came from a low-wealth neighborhood. Coyne-Beasley remembers desperately wanting to give them the same access to care that others had. Since then, she has grown to be a passionate advocate for people with limited options and limited access.
“One group that I felt needed more attention were adolescents,” said Coyne-Beasley. “Adolescence is a point in the lifespan where there is a real opportunity to make a difference in the life choices people make -- to truly impact the trajectory of their path. The same may be true of early childhood, but adolescence is generally that time period people forget about or are less patient with, so it gets less resources and programs.”
So when Coyne-Beasley became a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at UNC, she decided to focus on two areas related to adolescent health: firearms and sexuality research, including sexually transmitted infections. Laughing, she admits that she couldn’t have picked two more highly polarizing – and difficult to fund – topics to study.
“I learned that there are ebbs and flows of research funding interests that are actually influenced and impacted by politics,” said Coyne-Beasley, who is now a full professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill. When she was still new to research, many groundbreaking studies had just come out demonstrating the danger of firearms. In response, the National Rifle Association petitioned Congress, and succeeded in removing many federally funded sources for research on firearms.
In her role at the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, Coyne-Beasley has been working to address adolescent health-related issues through research, programs and policy. NC TraCS is UNC’s home of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs), a national effort to translate discoveries into improvements in patient care and community health. Within the NC TraCS Child Health Core, Coyne-Beasley is the associate director of Community Engagement and the director of the North Carolina Child Health Research Network. She is also the co-director of the North Carolina Multidisciplinary Consortium for Adolescent Research and Health.
Through a series of meetings with community groups around North Carolina, most prominently Healthy Carolinians, Coyne-Beasley and other researchers at NC TraCS helped establish a list of seven research priority categories, which, in addition to injury and violence, include obesity; mental health and substance abuse; delivery and access; childhood and youth issues; chronic disease; cancer; infectious disease; and environmental health. She says such priorities help researchers focus on building the evidence-based strategies needed to target specific issues.
“For a lot of issues like violence and injury prevention, one strategy is not enough -- it is not like you can give a medicine or a shot and be done,” she said. “Through research we are realizing that the strategies to prevent violence are not just criminal justice strategies, but also include education strategies, food strategies, poverty strategies, antidiscrimination strategies and parenting strategies. It is more than just taking the guns away; it is understanding how to get rid of the perpetration of violence in our music, in our media, in our recreation, in our sports, in our reality shows, in our culture.”
Given her passion for the topic, it is not surprising that one of Coyne-Beasley’s proudest accomplishments is Love our Kids Lock Your Guns, a community firearm safety education and gun-lock distribution program she started. The 10-year-old program has effectively engaged the Durham community in protecting children through gun safety, has affected policy and programs in that area and has become a model for other organizations on how to change safe gun storage and other firearm-related behaviors.
“We explain that the safest environments for children are environments without firearms and try hard not to make this a political issue,” said Coyne-Beasley. “This can be tricky for me as a clinician given that there is so much evidence that guns in the home are dangerous. But I also recognize that people are going to have them. So we talk about what safe storage is, explaining that it is not on the top of a shelf in your closet; it is unloaded, locked up, with the ammunition locked and stored separately where kids can’t get to it. We also provide tools for families to enable them to lock up their guns and unload them. Additionally, we discuss alternative measures for keeping one’s family safe.”
The Love our Kids Lock Your Guns Program now exists with a network of volunteers -- health educators, stay-at-home moms, law enforcement officers, concerned citizens, representatives from the City Council, medical professionals, school officials, religious organizations and even a member of the NRA -- meeting monthly as the Durham County Gun Safety Team to decrease gun violence. It’s a good thing that Coyne-Beasley has the help, because she is juggling a number of other projects in both injury prevention (violence and firearms prevention) and sexual health.
For instance, she just received funding from the North Carolina Cancer Fund to use telemedicine and texting to increase the number of people getting vaccinated against human papillomavirus or HPV -- the virus that causes multiple cancers, including cervical and anal cancer. Her approach uses a steering committee of middle school students to help develop the messages, with rural school-based health centers serving as sites for the telemedicine program. Coyne-Beasley says the aim is to empower young people by targeting interventions specifically at them, though they also encourage a dialogue with parents.
Coyne-Beasley’s expertise in the HPV vaccine and other vaccines is evident in her appointment from the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The post means that she is one of only 15 voting members that make vaccine policy for the country. Her experiences on the committee no doubt inform her research on HPV messaging, just as her research feeds back into her decisions on how to make the best policy decisions for adolescent girls and boys. It is just another area where her many roles are intertwined, which is the way that Coyne-Beasley likes it.
“To me research is most useful when it can be translated to practice or policy, because if it is just going to end up in a manuscript or book it may not have the same impact,” said Coyne-Beasley.
As far as her kids are concerned, Coyne-Beasley’s research on adolescent health has meant that they have heard about the birds and the bees (or sexual development), and the dangers of firearms and alcohol earlier and more frequently than their peers. But whereas other parents may dread giving “the talk,” for Coyne-Beasley it is just another part of her life’s mission: keeping kids safe.
