Trauma Medicine In Las Vegas: DoctorNews.com Issues Special Report On Triage After Mass Shootings

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Nov 01, 2017, 14:02 ET

MARINA DEL REY, Calif., Nov. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The average U.S. hospital might statistically expect to see one gun injury in a four-week period. After Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd at the Route 91 music festival, Las Vegas Sunrise Hospital had to process and treat 211 trauma victims in a span of hours.

DoctorNews.com spoke with the leader of the emergency room team who answered the pager and helped bring order to what could have otherwise devolved into medical chaos. Our interview with Dr. Christopher Fisher is available at the site.

Sunrise Hospital Trauma Team - L to R: Dave MacIntyre, MD; Stephen Chock, MD, Chris Fisher; MD, Kitae Kim, MD and Matt Johnson, MD

"Hollywood has a knack for turning everyday physicians into miracle workers," notes DoctorNews Managing Editor Scott Martin. "Dr. Fisher and his team proved the truth behind the fantasy."

An excerpt from the interview reveals both the extreme measures Sunrise Hospital took to manage the flood of incoming ambulances and the training that made it possible to save hundreds of lives:

Las Vegas Sunrise Hospital is an American College of Surgeons certified trauma center, so the staff had drilled twice a year to prepare for mass casualties.

Nearly everyone, whether scheduled to work, on call or off for the night, came into work, a team of over 100 medical professionals assembling in less than an hour. Procedures that had been put in place theoretically during training were tested in real life.

"We do drill for this, and so we have the mechanisms and structure in place," says Fisher. "But nothing compares to the real thing, the drill doesn't compare to the real thing. I think overall we did everything really excellently."

Without that preparation and timing, the Sunrise E.R. truly could have looked like a war zone. Instead, hospital staff diagnosed incoming patients fast enough to organize 30 times the normal flow of trauma cases, routing wounds to specialists ready to save lives.

That's what miracles look like.

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SOURCE DoctorNews.com