Clinicians at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center didn’t hesitate to answer the call following the tragic shooting on the Las Vegas strip.
When I walk into the ED, it’s normally just 45 beds. But the day of the shooting we had patients in every single spot of the hallway, every single chair. Every station where one bed would go, we had at least two to three beds.
We utilized station 1, which is our heart trauma resuscitation bay, to directly bed our patients who were triaged red; those are the patients who have seconds or minutes to live. We ended up having 63 patients who were in critical condition. Not all of those were red, many were yellow-those who have an hour or so to live and need some active resuscitation, but didn’t need emergency procedures at that time.
We had over 20 physicians and advanced practice clinicians respond to the ED within about an hour to an hour and a half.We ended up seeing 215 patients that night. Those are the ones who were registered. A lot of people came in with simple shrapnel injuries. They were bandaged and weren’t even put into our system.
We have a very special team here in Las Vegas. Sunrise Hospital is a very busy place to work anyway. We’ve always stressed a team approach and the next-man-up type of mentality. That certainly was displayed that night.
To think that at 10 at night our providers answered the call and came in without question, that was the reason why we saved so many lives that night. If we did not have that response from our team, a lot more lives would have been lost.
Article Source: Modern Healthcare
Written by: Matthew Weinstock