Dr. Shane Broderick

Yeah, I'm a consultant in emergency medicine and trauma at the matter, that's right.

Yeah, no, that's what we've seen.

Unfortunately, when I came back from Australia, it's almost two years ago now, we just kind of felt that things were different.

It wasn't kind of the same demographic that we were dealing with.

I felt that I was seeing more knife crime

So we just looked at our own data and exactly the figures that you quoted there between the pre-COVID and post-COVID areas, we had seen a 68% rise in life-related attendances to our emergency department.

Yeah, definitely a male preponderance, but if you look at the breakdown of it, even though females would probably represent maybe less than 3% of the overall demographic, that is an increase on what we had seen previously.

So maybe more women are involved at a victim or perpetrator level as well.

Well, injuries really from the head to the toe, like knife crime affects any part of the body.

And so some injuries are, you know, have more morbidity or mortality associated with them.

But a message that we, you know, do definitely want to get across is that there isn't any safe place to stab somebody.

Somebody can die from

a stab wound to the arm just as easy as a stab wound to the chest but in terms of the overall injury pattern and knife injuries we're seeing them on every part of the body.

I would agree with some of those comments that you mentioned earlier on.

I work in the UK at the Royal London Hospital as well.

And that's what they're seeing over there, that young males, when they're questioned about it, there is a kind of gone with this pack mentality where they do carry knives.

And it is because they know that these people who, these other gangs that they'll be associating with will also be carrying knives.

The WHO does mark kind of four different pillars when it comes to kind of tackling and delivering interventions.

So with interventions for the person themselves,

for their network, and that means kind of their family, their friends, their associates, the media as well, you know, the responsibility on kind of responsible reporting and such, and then at a societal level as well, and embedded in those societal interventions are violence intervention programs and recidivism prevention programs as well, to try and tackle all those together.