COLUMBUS (WCMH) – As Columbus deals with a historic amount of violence, doctors and their teams are working to save as many victims as they can.

One of the Columbus doctors who works to save patients’ lives after they’ve been shot said what he’s seen in the last year is like nothing he’s seen before.

“Obviously, we have to do what we need to do to take care of who needs to be taken care of,” said Dr. Urmil Pandya, trauma medical director for Grant Medical Center. “It’s very resource intensive.”

Trauma centers have been busy as Columbus continues to deal with a rise in violence. From the moment a patient arrives at Grant, the trauma teams are focused on what the injury is and what they need to do about it.

Pandya has been a trauma surgeon at Grant for 13 years.

Grant is the biggest level 1 trauma center in the region and it’s also downtown, so Pandya said most of the city’s shooting victims are taken there.

As the numbers are up for the city over the past year, there’re also up at the hospital.

Grant treated 513 gunshot wound victims in 2020, a rise of 57 percent from the previous year, Pandya said. And 2021 is off to a violent start as well.

“From a regional perspective, we see, by far, the most number of gunshot wounds and injuries due to violence and that’s a huge uptick, most specifically related to gunshot wounds,” he said. “It’s actually astounding how high it’s been thus far.”

Pandya estimates that 85 to 90 percent of gunshot victims taken to Grant do survive.

“As wonderful as it is to deal with it when we have a good outcome and can tell someone they’re going to live and going to do fine, the opposite is true when you have to tell them the most horrible news of all,” Pandya said.

Pandya said over the past year, 40 percent of their shooting victims have been under 25-years-old.

“There’s been times in the past we’ve had spikes here and there, but the difference is it’s just so much more,” he said. “Usually, you need numbers to tell you that it’s more, but nobody in our hospital and none of the surgeons need to hear the number.”

Pandya said from a surgeon’s perspective, all focus in on what needs to be done for the patient, and the emotional toll doesn’t hit until after the shift.

“You ask yourself, ‘Why was there three or four people that got shot tonight? There is no reason for that,'” he said. “It pushed us really forward into not just figuring out how do we fix people, save people that have been injured. How do we prevent them from ever coming in the first place.”

So far this year, the hospital has already taken care of 88 shooting victims. Pandya said that’s higher than usual as January and February are usually quieter months.