Critical condition: Baltimore ERs struggle to keep gunshot victims alive

Gun violence is taking a toll on urban hospitals’ already overburdened emergency and trauma care resources, leaving clinicians to struggle to save the lives of severely wounded gunshot victims.

With the intensity of gun crime on the uptick in Baltimore, keeping gunshot victims alive has become a challenge for trauma care providers, with many calling it a public health crisis,The Baltimore Sun reports

Many victims come to the ER with multiple wounds, which in some cases require several different surgeons to be in the operating room to work simultaneously on different areas of the patient's body, according to the article. 

“Some of these people need three, four, five operations,” Elliott R. Haut, M.D., a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, told the publication. “It takes a lot of work.”

In many cases, trauma and ER surgeons must rely on the possibility of a “great save,” a gamble that can lead to the patient's survival.

The mortality rates would likely be worse if not for Baltimore’s world-renowned emergency medical clinicians, according to the article, but some have suggested that this only doubles some shooters’ resolve to ensure they kill their targets before they make it to the hospital.

Gun violence costs Baltimore hospitals about $19 million a year, in many cases in the form of charity care since nearly 80 percent of victims are covered by Medicaid and about 1 in 5 are uninsured. Since 2004, hospitals have boosted staff to deal with such issues, with Johns Hopkins University increasing its full-time trauma doctors six-fold, according to the article.

Other cities have taken similar steps to take on the problem of gun violence head-on, such as a recent initiative in Philadelphia that altered hospitals’ emergency trauma response to gunshot wounds, FierceHealthcare previously reported.