Wainwright Health Centre director describes mass casualty event at hospital | Hanomansing Live

One of the extraordinary stories has been the response of hospitals in Alberta, and that started with Wainwright Health Centre. Dr. Cheyenne Vedder is the medical director there and joins us now. Dr. Vedder, this must have been a harrowing 48 hours for you and the rest of your staff. How are you doing this evening? Thanks. I'm doing well. And I think our staff is doing excellent, given what they've been through in the past weekend. I'm not trying to get any information about people and you know trying to do anything that would violate confidentiality at all but I am trying to kind of give our viewers a sense of of as I say the extraordinary things that happen at hospitals in Wainwright in Edmonton and Calgary as well I believe and I just wonder if you can take us back to the the first few hours after the incident what was happening at the medical center what that was like absolutely i wasn't on call in emergency on saturday so i didn't receive the first call but my colleague who was tells me that the military phoned ahead to communicate us and let us know that they were coming in with a mass casualty incident from the time they received that phone call within about five to ten minutes the first victim started to arrive and immediately we realized that the extent of their injuries was quite extreme and quite severe. At that time I'm not sure who did it on our team but whoever did it I commend because the rollout of our plan for mass casualty situations rolled out extremely smooth with multiple hospital staff reporting. All of our physicians showed up and as patients kept coming in, we did our best to manage them. We are a very small emergency department with six rooms only. We first chose to fill those rooms with two patients in each room. We then started to begin moving patients up to our acute care floor which turned into a functional emerge for the night. The response was excellent from AHS and the larger province. That was one of the things that impressed me most. STARS and the flight doctors were on scene very quickly. And we coordinated through central channels to ensure that the patients got the care they needed in as timely of a fashion as we could provide. Yeah, it's extraordinary hearing you even describe that. And so it feels to me that at least two things were going on in parallel that that you you have to care for patients of course and and and some of them obviously you know badly injured and and you know in need of immediate care but also you have to decide which of those patients need to go and where they need to go who who coordinated that yeah so how we set up was we assigned roles to our physicians and our clinical staff. Huge appreciation for the STARS flight physicians who helped us a ton when they got there. We linked in with Rapid, which is our central access line that AHS has to ensure that patients get timely treatment at the most appropriate level of care. Rapid and the central system really helped to coordinate this effort as there was a direct link with our incident command set up in our boardroom and the larger provincial system. It actually made transfer of patients extremely smooth in that we were able to load them either onto a ground unit or onto a aircraft and get them to the appropriate ICUs that they needed to be in we had tremendous support not only from the flight physicians on scene in Wainwright who came and helped in our emergency department but also from the intensivists across the province who were willing to accept the emergency departments in Edmonton and Calgary played a huge part as well And as a rural facility, I think we felt quite supported by our colleagues in tertiary care. You've mentioned STARS a couple of times, and people in the eastern half of the country may not be familiar with it. I believe you're talking about air ambulance, you know, by helicopter systems. So helicopters came in, I assume, to Wainwright. And you were saying that there were doctors on board those helicopters? Yes. So the STARS helicopters came in as soon as it was safe for them to. And they had physicians with them. We also had air ambulance with fixed wings come in, which was excellent with multiple critical patients going to different ICUs. it was awesome that we were able to provide the appropriate level of care that they needed through transport to ensure that they got to where they needed to be as quick as possible yeah and on a saturday night in edmonton busy always uh there was a MMA event at Rogers so maybe even busier than usual but the emerge as far as i know at royal alexandra was shut down because they were prepared to receive patients. And, of course, there's a burn unit, I believe, at Royal Alexandra. There's another one in Calgary, and that's where a lot of these patients went. I mean, it does seem like an extraordinarily smooth interaction among all these different agencies. And then we saw the video of, I believe, was it medics from the armed forces parachuting in? Can you tell me about that? Yes, the medics from the armed forces did parachute in to help us out. And at that time, we were really running low on clinical supplies. So just as important as them showing up was that they actually brought some clinical supplies that we were in desperate need of. And it was wonderful because I do believe some of those supplies were picked up from surrounding hospitals in our area. and they were able to deliver them to us so we were able to use them and and perform the interventions we needed to you know people will be studying obviously what happened here and it sounds like a lot of you know good things happened here in the midst of of a really bad situation but but is there any message you want to give to especially small town small city hospitals and in other parts of the country yeah i think honestly as a community out here and as a facility staff everyone rose to the occasion above and beyond my expectations i'm extremely grateful for all of the support services we had there overnight including pharmacy housekeeping stores personnel who made sure that those of us providing clinical care were really able to focus on providing that clinical care and they worried about everything else so I would just really like to say you know for a small hospital I was extremely proud of how the team rose to the occasion and I was very grateful for how well AHS and the healthcare system was able to deal with this event quickly and really able to problem solve as the situation evolved. AHS, Alberta Health Services, right? The provincial government's health services. Dr. Shayan Vetta, Medical Director of Wainwright Health Centre. Thank you very much for talking to us this evening. Thank you.