Newswise — This weekend, during a music festival in Las Vegas, a gunman fired a barrage of bullets killing at least 50 people and injuring more than 400 others in the worst mass shooting in modern American history. Tragic events such as this one leave in their wake an innumerable amount of family members and friends in search of healing as they struggle to reconcile feelings of loss, fear, anger, depression, anxiety and more.

Penn Medicine provides an array of programs that assist families with recovery following traumatic events:

• Efforts across the nation are on-going to help bring life-saving advances learned on the battlefield to the civilian EMS and hospital based emergency departments and trauma centers. For example, the national Stop the Bleed Campaign teaches participants evidence-based life-saving bleeding control techniques shown to dramatically increase survival rates in mass casualty incidents. Penn Medicine kicked off its Stop the Bleed campaign last year with an event at Lincoln Financial Field that provided more than 250 school nurses with hands-on training on how to stem bleeding through proper application of tourniquets, gauze packs or bandages, and safely open an airway.

• The Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery (CYFTRR) provides treatments for children, adolescents and their families who are suffering from symptoms of traumatic stress and other difficulties after exposure to violence, crime and abuse. The Center helps families to cope with many of the related issues that frequently occur in the aftermath of traumatic events and is the only provider in the Philadelphia area that offers an effective early intervention for youth who have had a recent traumatic experience as well as treatments for youth with existing PTSD and post-traumatic difficulties.

• The Penn Injury Science Center, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brings together university, community, and government partners around injury and violence intervention programs with the greatest potential for impact. The center promotes and performs the highest quality research, training and translation of scientific discoveries into practice and policy, to reduce injuries, violence and their impact to our region, the US, and locations around the world.

If you are currently working on a story related to the mass shooting in Las Vegas or planning a related story about treatment for trauma following mass shootings and other tragic events, I’d be more than happy to help you schedule an interview with any of our Penn Medicine Experts in the areas of Trauma, Mental Health, Mass Casualty, Bleeding Control, and disaster preparedness:

• Jeremy Cannon, MD, SM, FACS, joined Penn Medicine’s trauma team after completing his military service in the US Air Force as the Chief of Trauma & Critical Care at San Antonio Military Medical Center, the DoD’s only Level I trauma center. Having seen and treated the kind of wounds inflicted by high-velocity rifles during his active military service, Dr. Cannon is well versed in how they, compared to other guns, pulverize blood vessels and soft tissue, the kinds of wounds they cause, and how advances in trauma care are helping to save lives both in the military and civilian sectors. Advances in the way trauma care is delivered on the battlefield have made remarkable strides in saving the lives of those with devastating wounds, nearly eliminating preventable deaths through more rapid and better trauma and combat casualty care.

• Peter Sananman, MD, is an assistant professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine, and director of Penn's Disaster Preparedness Program. In addition to providing patient care in the Emergency Departments at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Dr. Sananman leads emergency staff training programs in various areas related to disaster preparedness and disaster medicine. Dr. Sananman is also a leading expert on emergency response preparedness for handling situations such as infectious disease outbreaks and mass casualties.

• Steven Berkowitz, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and an associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as the Director of the Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery. His primary focus has been on the development of interventions for children living in psycho-social adversity, especially in the area childhood trauma with a focus on crisis and early intervention.
• Douglas J. Wiebe, PhD, an associate professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has published extensively on urban violence, environmental risk factors for injury, and challenges of activity pattern measurement and exposure measurement. His research also spans how keeping a firearm at home relates to homicide, suicide, and unintentional shootings of household members, as well as clinical management of trauma and mild traumatic brain injury. Wiebe also directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded Penn Injury Science Center.

• Michael Thase, MD, is a professor of Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Penn’s Mood and Anxiety Disorders Treatment and Research Program. His research focuses on the assessment and treatment of mood disorders, including studies of the differential therapeutics of both depression and bipolar affective disorder.

Our experts are available for phone or on-camera interviews. Please call or email me using the contact information below to schedule an interview.