Skip to main content

Controlled Chaos at Las Vegas Hospital Trauma Center After Attack - The New York Times

posted onOctober 3, 2017
>

Article snippet: On Sunday night, Toni Mullan drove 110 miles an hour on side streets from home to get back to University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, where she had just worked a 12-hour shift as a clinical supervisor in the trauma resuscitation department. Her car was smoking as she pulled into a three-hour parking spot close to the trauma center. Ms. Mullan, 54, left her hazard lights blinking as she shut the car door and raced inside. Around a dozen patients had already arrived from the shooting scene at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Two were dead and two had been “black tagged” — fully assessed and found to have injuries that were not survivable. Ms. Mullan’s daughter, Antoinette Cannon, 29, a trauma nurse who also works at the hospital, was standing out front with a physician assistant, taking injured patients out of vehicles as they drove up to the hospital and quickly assessing whose conditions were the most precarious. “The minute I got there, I looked at the situation and said ‘How am I going to utilize my resources?’ ” Ms. Mullan, a registered nurse, said in a telephone interview Monday morning. By daybreak, 104 patients had arrived. University Medical Center is the only level-one trauma center in Nevada and one of only a few free-standing trauma units in the nation. That means it is fully staffed with surgeons and trauma nurses day and night to handle injuries and mass casualties, from vehicle crashes that bring in 10 patients at a time to a 2015 episo... Link to the full article to read more

Emotional score for this article