Dr Tunji Lasoye is woken by the telephone. It is after 2am and within seconds he must decide whether the young man shot in South London minutes earlier requires his help.

“If it’s a single shooting, probably they will deal with it fine,” he says. In that case, over the phone from his home in Thamesmead, he directs operations at King’s College Hospital Accident and Emergency Department. If the young man has been shot a number of times, or if several people have been shot, Dr Lasoye will immediately drive to the hospital, in Denmark Hill. He is the lead A&E clinician at King’s and in the past five years has become an expert on gunshot wounds.

“There are times when it’s pretty quiet,” he said. “Then you will have unfortunate times like this week when you have three or four in succession.”

This week in South London there have been four shootings and a fatal stabbing. James Smarrt-Ford, 16, was shot dead while ice-skating, Michael Dosunmu, 15, was in his bedroom when he was killed in what is thought to have been a case of mistaken identity.

The hospital for which the ambulance heads is very often King’s. It has a broad range of specialists and as Graham Chalk, a senior paramedic at the London Ambulance Service, says: “An awful lot of knife crimes and shootings happen in their catchment area.”

There were 505 “gun-enabled crimes” in Lambeth and Southwark in 2006. Although not all were shootings, guns were used by criminals at least once a day in the hospital’s catchment area.

After this week’s events the antigun activist Lucy Cope, who lives in Peckham, was despairing. “Three years ago I would have said there is hope,” she said. “It’s like a Scud missile has hit our community. I dread to think how many more murders we will see by the summer.”

After a shooting, the police secure the scene — and also the hospital department that will take the victim. “I remember arriving in A&E and the first thing you see is armed police,” said Mrs Cope, founder of Mothers Against Guns, “That really scares you.” Her son Damian died after being shot outside a club in Holborn following an altercation in Peckham.

Paramedics alert the A&E department that a victim is on the way. “From their estimated time of arrival you can gauge the severity,” said Dr Lasoye. “If it’s ETA ten minutes, they have some kind of control on it. If it’s ETA two minutes, you drop everything and all hell breaks loose.” A “trauma team” of about 15 assembles.

“We call it the golden hour, when the battle will be won or lost,” said Dr Lasoye. “We ‘resusc’ them, we do all the things that are life-saving and work out which surgical department to send them to.”

The trouble is, one victim might need heart, bowel and orthopaedic surgery. “Bullets don’t usually cause injury in one neat area of specialism,” said Jim Ryan, who served as a military doctor in Northern Ireland, the Falklands and the Balkans — and subsequently advised on army field hospitals in Afghanistan. Professor Ryan is considered Britain’s leading expert in gunshot wounds.

Next month in a big laboratory in Central London, not far from where Mrs Cope’s son was shot, 20 surgeons, mainly from British hospitals, will get a crash course in dealing with bullet wounds from 20 top surgeons, mainly from America.

Professor Ryan said: “They learn to open up cavities they may know little about. Often in novel ways. You might have to go across the body in a sabre cut, following the track of the bullet.”

When Professor Ryan helped to found the course in 1994, the Royal College Of Surgeons insisted that he should train civil as well as military doctors — a decision that has proved wise.

“On the streets 15 years ago you would mainly see low-velocity handguns,” he said. “Now people are getting their hands on all the paraphernalia of the battlefield: machine pistols and high-velocity weapons.”

Mrs Cope arrived at University College Hospital early in the morning of July 30, 2002. Her son had been in theatre for six hours and ten minutes, when a trauma nurse came out. “I could tell by the way her eyes were watering,” said Mrs Cope. She was led in to see her dead son.

“I opened his eyes. I wanted to see them one last time. He was still warm and I could smell his aftershave. I lay down beside him, I put his arm round me. I sang to him. And I told him no matter how long it takes, I would get justice.”

Peckham funerals are like pageants: the horse and carriage, the white doves, the procession. “Families want to send a message to the perpetrators,” said Mrs Cope. “This is the person you took away.”

Facts of death

100

Units of blood that Lucy Cope’s son is said to have been given before he died

400

Velocity (ft per second) of older handguns

800

Velocity of new handguns

5,001

Injuries from firearm crimes 50 People shot dead in 2005-06

50

People shot dead in 2005-06

Sources: Agencies, Mrs Cope, Prof Jim Ryan

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