So on the most awful of days — when "this" involves a dozen young people fighting for their lives after being shot, at close range, by a gunman in a suicidal rampage — it took special teamwork among area hospitals Monday to give the patients their best chance at survival.
It takes medics at the scene to be in touch with emergency officials, and those at the various hospitals, to know how many patients can be sent to each trauma center.
And it takes teamwork from not just medical staff, like emergency-room doctors and nurses, but also everyone from chaplains to food service personnel, a Lancaster General Hospital spokesman said today.
On a day of tragedy, it was a rare bright spot, everyone seemed to agree today.
LGH worked in conjunction with Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Reading Memorial and Christiana (Del.) hospitals to care for the seven who initially survived Monday morning's rampage.
At LGH, it was the second-highest-level of "condition green," in which mass casualties were about to arrive, officials there said.
For officials at Hershey, which received three of the wounded, "coordination is really the key, both in your hospital and in your region," said Dr. Chris DeFlitch, vice chairman of the emergency department.
"And the communications piece also is vital ... good information is just really critical."
Along with the shooting victims, Hershey had just received victims from two major car accidents, said DeFlitch, who was alerted to Monday's situation while he was in computer training, which was quickly dropped.
The medical center had 100 people, both in the emergency department and support staff, ready to go after being alerted, the doctor said.
"We do practice for this several times a year ... we call them ‘specialty scenarios,’” for everything from mass injuries after a shooting to bioterrorism and even a pandemic flu situation, DeFlitch said.
Dr. Michael Reihart was the incident commander at LGH’s ER, which treated the victims initially, stabilized them and transferred them to hospitals that specialize in child care.
Reihart called it “an extremely frustrating, scary event. Any time a child is injured, it is very, very difficult for everyone involved.
“But in my 14 years of experience, I have never seen such teamwork.”
An LGH spokesman, John Lines, added that “every level and every area of the hospital, from housekeeping up to the physicians, were mobilized for this event. There was a bevy of activity, but it was very organized.”
There were a lot of extra-difficult conditions for emergency responders, said Lines, who has fielded media inquiries from Lancaster to Colombia, South America, and England’s BBC.
For example, the remoteness of the shooting site in Bart Township required several helicopters, he said.
Then there were “so many factors, the fact that the victims were Amish, that they were children, that made it so unique, and sadly tragic,” Lines added. “Doctor Reihart told the media that it added a higher level of importance to their work yesterday.”
At Hershey, DeFlitch agreed.
A disaster plan, activated after the 2004 tornado in Campbelltown and used “in preparing for any number of scenarios,” resulted Monday in “an amazingly coordinated effort ... and among nurses, physicians, and in fact all personnel,” the western Pennsylvania native said.
At Reading Memorial, Monday’s was the kind of situation it has prepared for since being accredited as a trauma center exactly a year ago.
Doctors at Reading treated one victim, a girl estimated by doctors at age 10, after she had been transported directly from the scene.
She was then transferred to Children’s in Philadelphia, hospital public relations director William J. Rudolph Jr. said this morning.
There was cooperation on other fronts as well, he said.
An official from West Reading police took an electronic picture of the wounded girl and e-mailed it to state police so she could be identified, Rudolph said.
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