Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said the sobering events from 9/11 are part of the reason why it appears every person who was wounded but alive at the Boston Marathon at the time of medical response will survive, according to an article in the New Yorker.
Three people died on Monday within the first moments of the explosions, which occurred 12 seconds apart at 2:50 p.m. EDT and left more than 170 people injured. Despite the mass chaos and dense traffic, responders were able to transport the injured to eight different hospitals around the city within minutes.
The first victims arrived to Dr. Gawande's hospital, Brigham and Women's, at 3:08 p.m. The first patient to go to emergency surgery was on the operating table by 3:25 p.m. Eleven more followed, "spaced by just minutes," said Dr. Gawande.
Inside hospitals across the city, a similar and natural orchestration began to unfold — partly out of necessity, partly out of providers' intuition. Stanley Ashley, MD, general surgeon and CMO at Brigham and Women's, said patients arrived too quickly and things happened to fast for any ritualized plan, according to the article.
Instead, he said he simply let people do their jobs. "He never needed to call anyone," wrote Dr. Gawande. "Around a hundred nurses, doctors, X-ray staff, transport staff, you name it showed up as soon as they heard the news. They wanted to help, and they knew how. As one colleague put it, they did on a large scale what they knew how to do on a small scale."
Richard Wolfe, MD, chief of the emergency department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the same type of coordination occurred at his hospital, according to the report. He expected to assign responsibilities, "but everybody spontaneously knew the dance moves," he said in the article.
Dr. Gawande emphasized how Boston hospitals were prepared for the tragedy, and their responses nearly seemed rehearsed. "A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety," he wrote.
He said hospital's disaster-response planning, more physicians' experience on battlefields or sites of natural disasters and horrific mass casualty events like the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., have resulted in this grim efficiency. "That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune," he wrote.
Bill Walczak, Former President of Carney Hospital, Runs for Mayor of Boston
Brigham and Women's Hospital Publishes Medical Errors to Drive Improvement
Three people died on Monday within the first moments of the explosions, which occurred 12 seconds apart at 2:50 p.m. EDT and left more than 170 people injured. Despite the mass chaos and dense traffic, responders were able to transport the injured to eight different hospitals around the city within minutes.
The first victims arrived to Dr. Gawande's hospital, Brigham and Women's, at 3:08 p.m. The first patient to go to emergency surgery was on the operating table by 3:25 p.m. Eleven more followed, "spaced by just minutes," said Dr. Gawande.
Inside hospitals across the city, a similar and natural orchestration began to unfold — partly out of necessity, partly out of providers' intuition. Stanley Ashley, MD, general surgeon and CMO at Brigham and Women's, said patients arrived too quickly and things happened to fast for any ritualized plan, according to the article.
Instead, he said he simply let people do their jobs. "He never needed to call anyone," wrote Dr. Gawande. "Around a hundred nurses, doctors, X-ray staff, transport staff, you name it showed up as soon as they heard the news. They wanted to help, and they knew how. As one colleague put it, they did on a large scale what they knew how to do on a small scale."
Richard Wolfe, MD, chief of the emergency department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the same type of coordination occurred at his hospital, according to the report. He expected to assign responsibilities, "but everybody spontaneously knew the dance moves," he said in the article.
Dr. Gawande emphasized how Boston hospitals were prepared for the tragedy, and their responses nearly seemed rehearsed. "A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety," he wrote.
He said hospital's disaster-response planning, more physicians' experience on battlefields or sites of natural disasters and horrific mass casualty events like the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., have resulted in this grim efficiency. "That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune," he wrote.
More Articles on Boston Hospitals:
Boston Hospitals Put to Test After Marathon ExplosionsBill Walczak, Former President of Carney Hospital, Runs for Mayor of Boston
Brigham and Women's Hospital Publishes Medical Errors to Drive Improvement