ORLANDO, Fla. – “It’s not a question of if another event like this is going to occur. It’s just a question of when.”
Ten years after the Pulse nightclub shooting, doctors at Orlando Health say the lessons learned that night continue to shape how hospitals across the country prepare for mass casualty events.
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“We’ve given something like 600 different talks around the world trying to pass those lessons on,” said Dr. Michael Cheatham.
The chaos began in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016.
“I picked up the phone and he said I have 20 gunshot wounds, I need you now,” Cheatham recalled.
Within minutes, victims from Pulse nightclub were flooding into Orlando Regional Medical Center. Doctors say a trauma room built for five or six people suddenly held 12 patients.
“Beds oriented in different ways… we had to kind of get creative to get all of them in the trauma room because that’s where most of our resources are for the most critically injured patients,” said Dr. Joseph Ibrahim.
Eight years after Pulse, Orlando Health unveiled its newly expanded Level One Trauma Center, more than doubling the size of the trauma bay and adding 10 more treatment areas for future mass casualty situations.
Doctors say one reason the hospital response moved so quickly that night was because they had unknowingly rehearsed for a similar tragedy just three months earlier.
“The scenario that year that occurred in March three months before Pulse was actually a mass shooter on the UCF campus,” Cheatham said.
That disaster drill sent hundreds of mock victims to hospitals across Central Florida.
“We had already kind of practiced, if you will. We had already drilled for a mass casualty shooting event. And I have no doubt in my mind that that saved lives,” Cheatham said.
But doctors say Pulse exposed challenges no training exercise had fully prepared them for.
“Most disaster drills focus on how to take care of patients. In our situation we had over 500 family members that were sitting outside of the hospital because the hospital were on lockdown,” Cheatham said.
“We had to support those 500 people, we had to provide them with water so they wouldn’t pass out, we had to provide them with phone chargers, we had to try and provide them with information.”
“Nobody ever talks about families. Nobody talks about how to take care of all the donations from the community.”
Doctors say one of the most lasting lessons involved the emotional toll on the people who responded that night.
“It didn’t really hit me for another month,” Ibrahim said.
Hospital leaders say Pulse changed how medical systems support first responders, doctors, nurses and staff after traumatic events.
“We counseled fifteen hundred team members in the next ten days,” Cheatham said.
Today, hospitals around the world study the Pulse response as part of disaster preparedness training, with the hope the lessons learned in Orlando may one day help save lives somewhere else.