Director, Pediatric Trauma Services; Co-Director, MGH Center for Gun Violence Prevention
Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts, United States
Peter T. Masiakos, MS, MD, FACS, FAAP, is a pediatric general and thoracic surgeon at Mass General and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He was trained at the Boston City Hospital and Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto), where he developed a clinical interest in pediatric trauma care and injury prevention. He is the director of the pediatric trauma surgery service at Mass General and has become a vocal injury-prevention advocate. He has broad interest in clinical surgery with a focus on general pediatric surgery.
Dr. Masiakos has been involved in successfully educating the Massachusetts legislature and the US Congress on the inherent risks that certain products pose to children and has testified both at the Massachusetts State House and at the Consumer Product Safety Commission on the need for new legislation that would prohibit the use of ATVs within specific age groups. He has aided in the development and passage of several forward-thinking injury prevention laws and continues to work alongside Massachusetts legislators and the Congress on several other comprehensive injury prevention laws including junior-operator laws, safe-driving laws and child-restraint laws. In 2019, Dr. Masiakos was the founder of the MGH Center for Gun Violence Prevention, dedicated to a multidiciplinary approach to mitigating gun violence.
Medical organizations across fields of practice have urged their members to counsel patients about firearm safety. Despite increasingly loud and public declarations that physicians have a role to play in addressing this public health crisis, in practice, many clinicians are disengaged or disempowered. In truth, practical and tangible tools for incorporating gun violence prevention into clinical care have not been clearly defined.
The Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Gun Violence Prevention (MGH-CGVP) was formed to address the national gun violence crisis using a public health approach which includes community education. In 2019, we piloted a novel hospital-based simulation curriculum for new medical trainees during their first-year onboarding. Since then, we continue to use this curriculum to train every entering intern in all residency programs how to become facile in these important injury prevention conversations in order to mitigate gun violence in America.
I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.