How an ER doctor in Chicago is tackling trauma from gun violence

Abdullah Pratt was only ever interested in science and in sports because of his older brother Rashad. He saw his brother excel at what he did, but Pratt’s life changed in 2012 when his brother was shot and killed in Chicago’s South Side.

“The most important thing that his life represented for me was that he relieved me of the burden to prove myself,” Pratt said.

That same year, while completing his first year of medical school, he lost seven or eight of his closest friends and high school classmates to gun violence. Chicago’s gun-homicide rate is four times the national average with 90% of all homicides involving gun use and an overwhelming majority of the victims being young Black men, according to research published this year.

“My salvation during this time of grief came through the same things that were sanctuaries to me as a youth,” said Pratt, at the 2023 STAT Summit in Boston on Thursday. This included mentoring youth football players and judging science fairs. After diving into community engagement, he eventually met Monica Peek, an emergency physician who became a mentor to help him understand and research the health inequities affecting the community.

Pratt is an emergency medicine physician and the faculty director of community engagement at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He uses his life experience and the needs of the community to develop programs — like the trauma recovery and prevention of violence program as well as the medical careers exposure and emergency preparedness program — to preserve others’ lives, engage the youth in the community, inspire them to pursue medical careers, and help them get through traumatic experiences.

When Pratt became an emergency medicine resident, he wanted to figure out how to implement his health equity research, which led to him to teach about community health preparedness, gunshot wound management, and CPR stroke recognition.

“But I would quickly learn that these youth in Chicago South Side are the most at risk for these emergencies in the country, by community,” Pratt said. Young people were already witnessing these emergencies, which they were having difficulty coping with.

“Our staff had the same problems coping,” Pratt added. “The same traumas that hit our youth were hitting our staff, and that forced us to create the trauma recovery and prevention of violence, or TRAP violence program.” This brought hospital resources from trauma centers to schools where the youth are impacted the most before they experienced a firearm injury.

Another program, the Medical Careers Exposure and Emergency Preparedness Program, or MedCEEP, came up when the young people in the community wanted to learn more about how to deal with an emergency, like a gunshot wound or cardiac arrest.

“That ended up leading to us realizing that the same students that you teach how to deal with an emergency, that became an empowerment wave for them and they wanted to then say, “How do I become an EMT? What can I do now? How do I be a CNA? I ultimately want to be a doctor.’” Pratt said. “And so we utilize these training that they need because they’re going to be facing this stuff everyday [and it] is actually a catapult into becoming … career professionals.”

Over 8,000 young people have been trained through these programs, with many of them seeking medical careers, but even with these programs, sometimes Pratt has to come to terms with the fact that not every injury can be prevented.

About a month ago, Pratt learned that one of the young people who had participated in his program was recently killed. “We had just lost a young lady, who was a 3.9 GPA student, wanted to be a doctor in Inglewood, was shot in the head after we had just trained them how to deal with gunshot wounds.”

So, what is the solution? Gun control and focusing on trauma-informed care at a young age, Pratt said. “We’ve seen studies that study this in Washington and Oregon and show that it’s cost-effective to start as early as you can helping address these factors that you know are going to face these youth one day.”

In the future, Pratt hopes that other emergency rooms or trauma centers would look at the University of Chicago Medical Center as a model to prevent injuries from gun violence. “So trauma centers, I think, should all have the model of what are we doing to prevent these crimes from happening on top of the research, but then also how are cultivating the next generation of leaders so we don’t have to always be in this think tank mode. Let the youth there dictate what the solutions are.”