Providence Medical Center was prepared for school shooting
Oct 24, 2014, 6:34 PM | Updated: Oct 27, 2014, 7:27 am
Although there’s never been a school shooting in Snohomish County like the one that happened Friday, Providence Medical Center in Everett was ready.
The hospital’s emergency room is the busiest in the state and is designated a level 2 trauma center, and regularly trains for just such an emergency, said Dr. Ryan Keay, medical director for the emergency room.
“We have to be able to ramp up quickly.”
Keay says as soon as the hospital learned of the shooting, it mobilized its incident command system.
Approximately 20 physicians responded – two heart surgeons, two neurosurgeons, one chest surgeon, two trauma surgeons, the vascular surgeon and 12 ER physicians raced to the emergency room to treat four teens with gun shot wounds.
“It’s about a team approach and that’s pretty much how we train as a team,” Keay says.
“It requires an orchestration of care for a patient when they come in to rapidly identify any life threat and provide definitive care for a patient.”
Additional medical staff were also mobilized to care for the existing patients and others seeking care from unrelated emergencies.
One boy and two girls shot at the high school all underwent surgery for gunshot wounds to the head. A 15-year-old boy was flown to Harborview Medical Center in critical condition. Two girls remained in critical condition at Providence Friday evening.
