A paramedic who was one of the first to respond to a shooting in downtown Auckland on Thursday said nothing can prepare you for the scale of the challenges involved.
Three men were killed, including the gunman, following a shooting at a construction site on Queen St around 7.20am.
Four people, including a police officer, remain in hospital undergoing treatment following the incident.
St John paramedic Alanna Burgess told 1News she and her team had been "finishing up with a patient at hospital when we were dispatched to the job in the city".
"No matter what you learn in the classroom or in a setting to try to prepare you, you have to take every incident as it comes," she said.
She helped with treating and transport the injured to the hospital.
Burgess said while she had attended a job with an active shooter in the past, "I've never been to a job, the possibility, the number of patients, the size of the building and everybody that was involved".
A cordon remains in place at the scene in downtown Britomart as forensic teams continue their scene examination over the weekend.
Police are also investigating how the gunman, Matu Reid, was able to access a pump action shotgun used in the shooting.
The 24-year-old had been sentenced to home detention in March after strangling a woman, fracturing her neck. He had an exemption to work at the construction site.
Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland said people who witnessed the incident will be going through a "period of intense psychological distress", particularly in the coming weeks and months, as they process their trauma.
"Disrupted sleep, flashbacks, bad dreams, feeling on edge, feeling like things are happening all over again – just that real sense of their 'fight or flight' is turned on."
Sutherland said for most people, the symptoms will "reduce over the next few weeks or months".
He encouraged people affected by the events to speak to support services like Victim Support.
But for those who worked alongside the gunman at the construction site, Sutherland said processing the events will be "more complicated".
"Naturally, we want to ask, 'why did this happen?', 'why did he do this?' and especially if you've known somebody, then that can just add another layer of complexity into processing," he said.
Police have said they're expecting to release the names of the men killed in the shooting next week.
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