CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Nursing students and medical employees are coming together and learning about what to do in an active shooter situation within a real hospital setting.
Charleston Area Medical Center held an active shooter drill Wednesday at its Center for Learning and Research.
Students from West Virginia State University and University of Charleston came together with CAMC staff members to conduct the drill with first responders from the Charleston Police Department and the Charleston Fire Department.
CAMC Integrated Health Education Medical Director Marc Dotson said they take the health and safety of their patients and staff very seriously and that means covering all bases, including addressing something as real and threatening as an active shooter situation.
“We all know it’s not a matter of if but a matter of when something like this happens,” Dotson said. “So, we really want to give the staff an opportunity to practice what it would be like in an active shooter situation, so we try to make it as real-life as possible.”
The first and second floor of CAMC’s Learning and Research Center was turned into a makeshift hospital Wednesday to perform the drill, complete with actors playing the roles of patients and active shooters.
Dotson said the first floor was set up similar to out-patient areas and non-clinical areas.
“Those will be staffed with members of registration, members of our emergency medicine residency and staff members from raspatory, dietary, as well as CAMC nursing, we’ll have patients in the beds as well, and this will give them the opportunity to make the decision on what to do with a real patient sitting there,” he said.
He said the second floor was going to be more like an in-patient setting with staff and “patients” divided up into individual rooms.
Dotson said having to continue to care for patients in such a real-life shooting scenario obviously makes it even more of a challenge.
“Again, what do you do if you got a patient lying in bed who can’t ambulate and you got to get out and save your own life, this gives them an opportunity to practice that,” said Dotson.
He said there’s inevitably a lot of chaos in these types of real situations, and so it’s crucial for CAMC employees to practice properly communicating with first-responders when the stakes are dire.
Following the drill, officers were going to give hospital staff a short debriefing on what they should or should not have done differently in handling the situation.
Dotson said that the drill is also a beneficial practice scenario for police officers and firefighters as well, because just as hospital staff need to know how to interact with first responders, first responders need to know how to interact with medical personnel as well as patients when something of this nature specifically unfolds in a hospital setting.
He said this is a very different set up than going into a school or an office building.
“In that setting, you are going to find people hiding who are ambulatory, able to respond to your commands, but in this situation, you may have patients who have dementia, who have issues with ambulation, and so that really makes a unique setting for an active shooter situation,” he said.
This was the second time CAMC has held an active shooter drill. They also hold a Mass Causality Incident simulation in the spring.
Dotson said while this kind of situation is fortunately a low-frequency one, it’s still one that they also can’t take lightly, so he said they need to be well-equipped for when it does occur.
“Anytime you have something that doesn’t occur a lot that has high stakes, we really want to try to produce that in a safe environment for people to practice.”