First, assess your surroundings to see if you are safe to respond, says Jeffrey Luk, MD, director of prehospital and disaster medicine at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Is there still active fire? Is the gunman gone? It’s critical to check in and think about whether you feel capable of responding under the circumstances.
“You can’t help anyone if you yourself are injured, right?” Dr. Luk says.
It’s perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed in a scenario where other people have been shot. But your actions as a bystander can give emergency medicine the best chance of helping a gunshot victim, says Erin Hall, MD, MPH, the medical director of the MedStar Washington Hospital Center–Community Violence Intervention Program in Washington, DC. She’s also an instructor for Stop the Bleed, a national public service campaign and training program run by the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Trauma to teach people how to effectively respond in emergency scenarios where someone is severely bleeding.
Dr. Hall says you can remember the next steps as the ABCs of responding:
- Alert the authorities
- Bleeding — find the source
- Compression on the wound