Associated Press
Life seems more precious these days to Dr. Chadwick Smith, an Orlando Regional Medical Center trauma surgeon who was on call that night a year ago when a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub.
Smith is used to confronting human suffering head-on in the operating room. But the sheer number of victims that night – 49 dead, 53 wounded – and the flood of relatives to the hospital left its mark on even a veteran like Smith.
“It’s affected me. It’s affected my family. How I describe that, I don’t know. It’s something that has changed me,” Smith said Wednesday.
“You deal with, say, somebody’s robbing somebody and they get shot, you deal with that a little bit differently than you do somebody in a terrible, innocent situation,” he said. “Then you multiply that by 80-some-odd people, combining those that lived and died, and emotionally that affects you a lot more.”
A year later, the Pulse attack has affected the daily operations of the hospital and the way employees plan for future disaster events. For example, instead of having dozens of public entrances to the hospital, there are now only a few to address safety concerns.
The hospital also modified its disaster plan, Smith said, including how to handle relatives of victims who show up looking for their loved ones.
“Most people are emotional. They may need medical attention. They may need pastoral care,” Smith said. “Having cellphone chargers for them, having food for them, it requires a lot of people and a lot of support, other than just a room to put people in and give them some water.”
They’ve also tried to improve on employee counseling and issues with patient identification, Smith said. The goal is to quickly and accurately tell anxious family members a loved one’s condition.
Hospital staff participated in an annual disaster drill in April.
“I will say everybody took that drill even more seriously this year than we have in the past,” Smith said.
Carlos Carrasco, the medical center’s chief operating officer, called his team’s response to the Pulse attack “remarkable,” the product of a culture built over decades.
“When you think about the team, people automatically think about those folks who were there that night,” Carrasco said. “But there were people that came in and sustained the efforts for months, all the way through to rehab.”
