We are increasingly seeing people with multiple injuries, particularly around areas of their bodies that are difficult to treat. Some of the kids are going out wearing stab vests, so people will stab them around those protectors – to the neck and other areas.

Every shift we’ll see about eight to 10 patients, of which half will have been stabbed, and every week we’re seeing two or three, maybe four shootings as well. Sometimes we’ll have nine or 10 patients on a shift who’ve all been stabbed, with several who need to go to theatre – it’s become commonplace.

It doesn’t have to be a Friday night or a Saturday night, this happens all the way through the week, day and night. We’re doing everything from basic wound care to continuing the resuscitation that was started at the roadside, to taking people to theatre to explore abdominal wounds or control bleeding from limbs.

And of course, if you only look at the numbers who come in by ambulance, you don’t see the full picture because about 30-40% of our firearms injuries self-present – they walk in.

Quite often people will be stabbed and not end up with a life-threatening injury, but it could be life-changing and will need intervention. Although there’s a huge focus on the number of people who’ve died, there’s not so much on the number who have survived.

And of course there are all those people who do not go to hospital at all. We do see people who come in who have been stabbed before, people who say: “Oh, it’s not that bad. I’ve been stabbed like this before. Nothing happened to me last time.”

I think the real crisis now is that we’ve got evidence-based solutions and we’re not actually putting them into practice, and there are people dying. I think we’ve got an ethical and moral obligation to be doing something about this.



Public health solutions have been implemented by the Cure Violence movement in the US, and they’ve worked in the VRU in Scotland, for instance. It doesn’t create an instant result, though. It doesn’t create something that can be spun within the next 12 months, because it needs to be put in place and sustained.

It might not be a nice soundbite or a big headline saying “Shock horror, being collaborative works”. But people have to bury their political ambitions and their egos to make this thing work as well. They’ve got to all work together – that’s one of the most difficult things.

• Duncan Bew is the clinical director for trauma and emergency surgery at King’s College hospital and a trustee at the anti-knife charity Growing Against Violence