One week after performing at President Obama’s second inauguration, Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed on a Chicago playground. Since then, gun violence advocates around the country come together on June 3rd for National Gun Violence Awareness Day to speak out, wear orange, and advocate for policy change to end the gun violence epidemic in our country.
In partnership with Moms Demand Action, Everytown, and United Playaz, staff from Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital came together on June 3rd to remember those lives lost to gun violence and bring awareness to what true prevention can look like.
And while this day brings much-needed attention to the devastating effects of gun violence, health care providers are called on more and more to speak to the realities of injury and death by guns.
As the only Level 1 trauma center in San Francisco and northern San Mateo County, ZSFG is on the front lines of gun violence in our community. And for trauma surgeons like Dr. Andre Campbell, working to save lives after the fact was never enough.
ZSFG is home to one of the leading hospital-based violence intervention programs, San Francisco Wraparound Project. A partnership between UCSF and ZSFG surgeons, emergency medicine doctors, and community-based patient advocates, Wraparound Program is vital to ending the cycle of violence so many of our communities face. Meeting victims of gun violence at the bedside, Wraparound staff work to change the circumstances that landed their patients in the operating room.
And it’s had great success. Models of this kind are popping up around the country, giving health care providers a voice in community-level change.
The Foundation is proud to support these innovative ways of affecting real change in preventing future gun violence.
Health Care Providers Speak Out:
– Dr. Chris Cowell on his experience with multiple mass shootings since Columbine High School: ‘There’s Nothing to Repair’: Emergency Docs on Injuries From Assault Weapons
– Speaker Pelosi Gives Remarks at a Wear Orange Event for Gun Violence Awareness: Dr. Andre Campbell, Mayor London Breed, Moms Demand Action, United Playaz, and Dr. Andre Campbell join Speaker Pelosi on June 1, 2022.
– Dr. Andre Cambell joins a Medscape panel on gun violence: What an AR-15 Does to a Child’s Body: Why Surgeons Can’t Look Away
– Dr. Andre Cambell’s opinion piece in CalMatters after the overturning of regulations on assault rifles in California in June 2021: Demand solutions to the epidemic of gun violence