Department of Emergency Medicine

Thomas Delaney, Ph.D.

(APRIL 26, 2023) Health care professionals play a critical role in promoting safe firearm storage, Associate Professor of Pediatrics Thomas Delaney, Ph.D., — who does suicide prevention work at the Larner College of Medicine — told Vox. “Particularly when there are children or youth in the home or people with identified risk for suicide, health care professionals have an opportunity to ask, ‘How are firearms in the home stored?’ and then provide guidance about how improving storage practices can increase the safety of everyone in the home,” he said. “Health care providers in general have a lot of credibility and often trustful relationships with patients built up over many years, and their guidance can be a powerful tool for increasing safe storage and, downstream, helping prevent suicide deaths, homicide deaths, and theft or improper accessing of firearms.”