Scenes from the battle to staunch flow of stab deaths

Yesterday another teenager was stabbed to death. As knife crime soars, hospitals across the UK are dealing with record numbers of victims. Through last week The Observer was given unprecedented access to the A&E unit at King's College Hospital, London, which admits more stab victims than any in England. This is the story of how the hospital staff cope:

London has gained the unenviable reputation as the place where young people are most likely to be stabbed. Already this year 25 teenagers have met violent deaths, most of them as a result of knives. The accident and emergency department at King's College Hospital in south-east London treats more victims of stabbings than any other in England - almost one every day.

At King's an astonishing 70 per cent of knife victims are aged between 13 and 19. While the number of such patients is going up, their age is going down. The youngest knife crime victim treated last year was a 10-year-old schoolboy. Last month the stabbing casualty list included a 14-year-old girl.

Until recently A&E staff saw few females with blade wounds. But last year more than 10 per cent of patients at King's with such wounds were teenage girls or young women.

Throughout last week King's gave The Observer unprecedented access to its A&E unit to witness how medical staff cope with the growing toll of knife crime. The stark reality of their work on the front line - dealing with the growing number of disputes settled with blades - raises many unsettling questions.

A&E staff usually deal with victims of falls, heart attacks and car crashes. But King's is near the knife crime hot spots of Peckham, Brixton and Camberwell, so its personnel have also become experts in treating the many people who have been stabbed - 295 last year alone. The area's many gangs pursue often bloody disputes, and drug dealers settle scores, almost on the hospital's doorstep.

'Five years ago we only had the odd female victim, usually as a result of domestic violence,' adds Lasoye. 'But last year 38 of the 295 stabbings we saw were female and, of them, only 15 were in that category. The other 23 happened in the same sort of circumstances as male victims of knife violence - in parks, nightclubs and in the street.

'If young females, who are often teenage mothers, are involved in this sort of thing, what chance does their child have of living a normal life?'

A few stab victims only need to be seen in the A&E department's minor injuries unit. But most are taken into the five-bed resuscitation unit, which is reserved for casualties suffering major trauma. Whenever a stab victim arrives with the knife still lodged in them, it is left there until a full assessment is made. 'The three key things we need to find out urgently are the size of the blade, the force used to put it in and what direction it went in,' explains Aidan Slowie, the most senior nurse in the A&E.