Stan, Clarence, Barry, and the Health Chatter team chat with Dr. Thomas E. Kottke, Kathleen Anderson, & Thea Williams about firearm storage and safety.Dr. Thomas E. Kottke is the medical director for well-being at HealthPartners, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, and a health services researcher at the HealthPartners Institute. With a background in internal medicine, cardiology, and public health, his work focuses on preventive care and community well-being.Kathleen Anderson is a clinical social worker, mother of three, and a volunteer educator with Be SMART, a national campaign dedicated to promoting secure firearm storage. Through education and advocacy, she helps raise awareness about the role safe storage plays in preventing accidental shootings, suicides, and gun theft.Thea Williams works at Hennepin County Medical Center, supporting families who have lost a loved one to firearm violence. She oversees multiple community outreach programs connected to the Next Step Program, a hospital-based violence intervention initiative. Her work includes managing the Monthly Women’s Group, the Harriet Initiative, and the Summer Basketball program, all aimed at fostering healing and community engagement.Join us for an insightful discussion on firearm safety, the importance of secure storage, and practical steps to help protect families and communities.Join the conversation at healthchatterpodcast.comBrought to you in support of Hue-MAN, who is Creating Healthy Communities through Innovative Partnerships.More about their work can be found at huemanpartnership.org.
Full Episode
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Health Chatter. And today's show, it's a little bit on the sad side because of the subject overall that we have to deal with. But hopefully, with the intervention that we're going to be talking about, we'll be able to be happy at the end. We're going to be talking about firearm storage today. We've got great guests with us.
Stay tuned just for in a second, we'll get to them. We have a great crew, as always, that helps us with our shows. Mandy Levine-Wolfe, Aaron Collins, Deandra Howard, Matthew Campbell, Sheridan Nygaard, all do our background research, our marketing, and get the shows out to you, the listening audience. So thank you to all of them. They've been with us since, well, actually for a long time now.
And the show is closing in on our third year. So this is exciting. Also with us is Dr. Barry Baines, who's our medical advisor, has been with us for a while now and provides a medical twist to many of the questions that we hope can lead to some interesting discussions. So Barry, thanks for being with us. And of course, there's Clarence.
Clarence is my trusted colleague in putting these shows out to you. And it's been a pleasure working with him. He's a great friend and colleague. So Clarence, thank you. Today, Firearms Storage, we have Dr. Tom Cockey.
Tom has been with us on a couple of other shows because Tom is involved in a lot of, in his career actually, besides being a physician, he's been involved in many public health issues. related issues that he and I have some history together with. We'll touch base on that in a second. He's the Medical Director of Wellbeing at Health Partners.
I think, if I'm not mistaken, Tom recently retired or still connected. recently retired, but still, I know he's still connected. If you know Tom, he'll be connected. He obtained his medical degree from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine and trained in internal medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal and the North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill.
Trained in cardiovascular diseases and preventive cardiology at the University of Minnesota and has been involved in in many, many, many public health related issues. He's unique in the sense that he carries on one hand, the public health charge and on the other hand, the medical torch. So Tom, thanks for being with us once again.
We also have Kathleen Anderson, a clinical social worker and volunteer educator at Be Smart. And hopefully at the end of the show, we're all going to be a little smarter, but we'll get into the logistics of that. The Be Smart campaign educates on the importance of secure firearm storage to prevent childhood firearm injury and death. And she volunteers her time. So, wow. Noble. Very, very noble.
And Thea. Thea Williams. who I just met, but it's interesting because I would almost call Thea an intervention person. You know, this is a, her, her background is she works with, with people who unfortunately have experienced, um, gun violence and in hospitals in the, uh, in metropolitan area in, uh, in Minnesota. And, um,
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