Hospital staffs worked tirelessly to save lives

After most of us had started to move on and heal from the shooting, the staffs at local medical centers were facing weeks of long hours to care for those who were injured physically and emotionally.

It would be more than six weeks — 47 days, to be precise — before the last shooting victim was released from a Las Vegas hospital.

During those weeks, our community’s health care providers performed miraculously and inexhaustibly.

Consider the enormity of their challenge: dealing with trauma normally not seen outside of a battlefield while also handling the daily health care needs of our community’s 2 million-plus residents. And doing it all for weeks on end.

They passed the test, which is a testament to their professionalism, their training, the support services provided by their employers and, mostly, the strength of their commitment to being caregivers.

What they went through the night of the shooting and in the days immediately following is simply incomprehensible to most of us. They walked through hallways streaked with blood into emergency rooms filled with wounded concertgoers, some critically injured.

Their patients had a range of wounds — gunshots, leg injuries from jumping over fences, cuts and abrasions, and many more. As surgeons operated, staff lined up patients on beds in the halls outside.

As University Medical Center trauma surgeon Jay Coates told USA Today: “We started divvying them up, taking them to the operating room and

Consider the enormity of their challenge: dealing with trauma normally not seen outside of a battlefield while also handling the community’s daily health care needs.

doing what’s called ‘damage control surgery,’ where you’re not definitively repairing everything. You are just stopping the dying.”

At Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, the hospital closest to the Strip, the staff took in 214 patients in just three hours. Well over half of those victims had suffered gunshot wounds.

To handle the crush of patients, the staff turned to its training, which included tabletop exercises involving more than 250 casualties along with live-action drills it had conducted with sister hospitals Mountainview and Southern Hills.

Such preparation, coupled with the extraordinary performance by health care providers, paid off in untold numbers of lives saved.

So to everyone involved — from the doctors and nurses to administrators to support staff — the community offers its gratitude.