My grandfather and uncles were hunters, and they always looked forward to their forays into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during deer hunting season. But while I was well aware of their activities, they never brought their guns into our house. So I never gave any thought to gun safety issues, even after I became a nurse—not even after caring for one memorable patient, a young man my own age who had been accidentally shot by a companion during a hunting trip.

What can nurses do?

“…a child finds an unlocked loaded gun and accidentally shoots themselves or someone nearby, a despondent teenager makes a rash decision to end their life with the family gun, a homeowner mistakes a family member for an intruder.”

It seems that we read about tragedies like these every day. Can nurses help prevent them? The American Academy of Nursing has recommended that health care professionals “assume a greater role in preventing firearm injuries by health screening.”

In “Nurses’ Knowledge and Comfort with Assessing Inpatients’ Firearm Access and Providing Education on Safe Gun Storage” in the September issue of AJN, Kimberly Smith Sheppard and colleagues report on their original research study, which examined nurses’ knowledge and comfort with assessing patients’ access to firearms and educating inpatients about firearm safety and storage.

Perhaps unsurprising results.

The authors surveyed nurses from medical and psychiatric units in their hospital to learn how comfortable the nurses were with talking about firearms and what might facilitate or present a barrier to having these conversations with inpatients.

Not surprisingly, their results demonstrated the following:

“…most [nurses] were unfamiliar with state gun law, had no prior training on firearm safety or storage, and had no prior training on how to educate others in this area.”

Read the article to learn more about their findings and their recommendations addressing how nurses could be involved in firearm safety screening and education. There, lead author Sheppard also discusses the work of the multidisciplinary Gun Violence Prevention Coalition at Massachusetts General Hospital, which she co-founded.