“Youth Violence is a Public Health Issue”: How a Group of Healthcare Professionals are Intervening in London’s Knife Crime Epidemic
We spoke to Lucie Emery, Project Coordinator at YourStance, about preventing youth violence, bridging the gap between young people and healthcare professionals, and training a generation of “Zero Responders”.
Your Stance Project Coordinator, Lucie Emery
2018 marked a turning point in the trajectory of Lucie’s career – it was the year she began working as a trauma nurse in London. “Before that, I had no idea about knife crime in London,” she admits. “I don't come from here, I'm from France, and once I discovered this it kind of opened up my whole vision of London. I had a very different view on everything.”
“WE TEACH YOUNG PEOPLE BASIC LIFE SUPPORT, CPR AND BLEED CONTROL. WE CALL OUR WORKSHOP ZERO RESPONDER, BECAUSE WE TEACH THEM WHAT TO DO BEFORE THE AMBULANCE AND THE FIRST RESPONDERS ARRIVE.”
She still remembers the patient that cemented her belief in the need for better violence prevention: a young person who had been attacked with a machete. “He survived and was fine, and was discharged,” she says. “But I just felt really frustrated about not being able to do enough in the hospital to discuss the depth of what happened, or doing a little bit of prevention and finding out how to avoid the situation that he was in.”
As she began working with more different professionals across the hospital, she realised that she was not alone in feeling this way – and that many of her colleagues not only shared her concerns, but were committed to taking some kind of action. “I could see that they were doing something in the community, so I wanted to get involved,” she says.
Her enquiries ultimately led to her being introduced to Ana Waddington, an A&E nurse who’d had similar experiences encountering young victims of serious violence. “There were just too many young people being injured in London – some coming to A&E, some not making it to A&E, and some bleeding in A&E to the point where they were not surviving or having life-changing injuries,” Lucie says. “So [Ana] thought of an idea for how to prevent these young people from getting injured, or from bleeding to the point of death.”
That idea became YourStance: a collective of experienced doctors and nurses dedicated to teaching London’s at-risk young people how to respond to an emergency, and what to do in the immediate aftermath of a violent incident. Ana founded the organisation, and Lucie has been its Project Coordinator since 2019 (a role she now balances “half and half” alongside her continued work as a trauma nurse).
“We teach young people basic life support, CPR and bleed control. We call our workshop Zero Responder, because we teach them what to do before the ambulance and the first responders arrive,” Lucie explains. “And what to do once they've called 999 – because we know that someone can bleed out in five minutes, but an ambulance in London has the target of [arriving in] eight minutes if it's an emergency. So there’s potentially a gap between the time of someone passing away and someone being saved by first responders.”
And this isn’t the only crucial gap that they hope to address. “We also want to bridge that gap between the healthcare professionals and young people,” Lucie says, noting that they often see poor communication in the hospital between these two groups, each of whom are dealing with their own challenges and pressures. “There's a lack of understanding between the healthcare professionals that are trying to do their job as best they can, with the resources and time given, and young people coming into the emergency department or the wards and feeling misunderstood, and then being labelled as ‘kicking off’ or ‘rude,’” she explains.
In her own experience, she’s often found that when she takes the time to simply ask these young patients how they’re feeling and whether it’s their first time in hospital, it becomes evident that they’re mainly just scared and overwhelmed. “They don't have their family around, it's very isolating, it's very lonely,” she says, adding that they often want to abscond due to sheer claustrophobia: “They're not used to being in a closed space, doing nothing all day, especially if they don't have their phone because their phone is with the police or lost or stolen. So yeah, it's just kind of creating this link between two entities.”
And this work extends beyond the walls of the hospital; besides the Zero Responder workshops – their most provided program in youth clubs, prisons and schools – they have also started rolling out a more comprehensive curriculum around youth violence, preparing young people for everything that could happen if someone is stabbed. “Obviously we have those life-saving skills,” says Lucie. “But there’s also questions around, why do the police attend first, and why is it important to communicate really well over the phone when you call 999?”
In such an urgent, high pressure situation, she points out, it’s easy to see how young people could feel frustrated by an operator's questions if they don’t understand why they’re being asked certain things. “So it's all about facilitating this conversation between professionals and young people again, because if they encounter each other in the community, it might make it easier and it might save a life.”
And saving as many young lives as possible is, ultimately, the engine that powers every facet of YourStance’s mission – from their outreach work with the metropolitan police, London Ambulance Service, and other organisations to their recruitment drives for more healthcare volunteers, and their practical workshops with the young people themselves. “Youth violence is a public health issue,” Lucie clarifies simply. And as public healthcare professionals, she and her colleagues at YourStance are dedicated to treating it as such.
YourStance is a team of experienced doctors, nurses and clinicians teaching young people in London vulnerable to serious youth violence how to respond to an emergency. Established in 2019, the organisation has taught over 3,500 young people and run nearly 300 workshops across London.
Website: https://yourstance.org
Instagram: @yourstance_cic