David M. White
Public Affairs Office
Eisenhower Army Medical Center
FORT GORDON, Ga. (Aug. 22, 2022) – Military drills and exercises underscore teamwork, discipline, and handling essential equipment -- all while under stress.
It was not a drill Wednesday, July 20, in Eisenhower Army Medical Center’s Emergency Department.
Shortly before 11 a.m., U.S. Army Reserve soldiers were attending an annual field training for medical units when lightning struck the area, killing one soldier and injuring nine.
Sgt. 1st Class Michael D. Clark, 41, was killed in the strike. He was an operating room specialist with the 933rd Forward Resuscitative Surgical Company. A native of Springfield, Mass., Clark was a 22-year veteran of the Army and the U.S. Army Reserve. He had deployed four times in support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, in the ED, the emergency tone sounded on the radio, alerting staff that EMS had been dispatched to a call. Dr. Michael Allen, emergency physician and EMS medical director, was on duty.
“We heard [the call] of a ‘lightning strike, multiple patients down,’” Allen said, “so we knew it was going to be a [mass casualty] situation from the get-go. With the training areas being on the other side of the installation, the time to first patients was probably in the neighborhood of 40-45 minutes.”
Eisenhower has a carefully laid-out MASCAL response plan, drilled once each year.
“You have to look at what resources you have,” Allen said, “and what your anticipated patient load and available supplies are going to be.”
The ED staff had a general idea of what they were facing: about 10 patients with at least four in cardiac arrest.
“We knew we had the bed space to handle it,” Allen said, “but we needed the personnel resources. We then notified the chain of command, ED leadership, the nursing supervisor and information desk to issue a Code Gray.” Code Gray called on the overhead paging system means standby or activate a response to a disaster.
The Code Gray was a siren call to medical staff across Eisenhower.
“If we hadn’t had that lead time,” said Suzette “Suzi” Dampier, RN, clinical nurse supervisor, “[our response] might have looked a little bit less finessed.
“The staff [who] showed up, if they didn’t have a job at the bedside, they were waiting in the labor pool … extra soldiers, staff from the hospital just showed up to do anything we asked. I had nurses who have been outside of the bedside in a specialty, such as patient safety, [come back to] the bedside, providing care to the injured.”
Allan agreed: “We had a very robust response from the folks in the hospital … the ICU, internal medicine, general surgery, radiology, anesthesia, pharmacy, logistics, PAD, and off-duty medics … everyone just descended upon the ER and then it was just a matter of [corralling] all of our resources for an organized and cohesive approach.
“We had laid out where our most critical patients were going to go, where our lesser injured patients were going to go,” Allen said. “Everybody [was] divided into teams; people [were] assigned to roles, some of which weren’t necessarily within their specialty. People showed up to help. We had resident physicians running samples to the laboratory, others doing computer order entry, and others doing bedside resuscitation and care. Everyone pitched in and helped. Everybody knew what their roles were going to be. We standardized the process.”
One mitigating factor was that the units in the field were medical units to begin with.
“As far as the individual outcomes for the patients involved,” Allen said, “the fact the unit was medical unit is absolutely what contributed greatest to the survival rate for this incident … Four people went into cardiac arrest when this happened. While one succumbed, the other three … arrived at the ER physically awake, alert, oriented, and if [we] hadn’t been told they were originally in cardiac arrest and needed CPR, we wouldn’t have known it.”
“Everyone had the mentality of listening to the team,” Dampier said. “Everybody was talking to the team. We had medics at the bedside, sorting through who had higher skills such as IVs, electrocardiograms, and specified patient-care roles as needed.
“It was a complete, 100 percent team effort,” she said.
“The in-patient teams here were very expeditious in moving patients out of the ER so we could resume normal operations,” said Allen. Once patients were stabilized, they were safely moved to in-patient rooms.
After three hours, all of the MASCAL patients had been treated and cleared from the ED. “There was one fatality,” Allen said, “two people were transferred to another facility. Six soldiers were admitted and one was treated and released.”
“The communication is what made it work,” Dampier said.
“I couldn’t be more proud of the Eisenhower team,” said Col. Heidi Mon, commander, Eisenhower Army Medical Center. “Our phenomenal staff, our continued focus on readiness, and our dedication to 5-Star health care are the keys to our success.”
As with all military exercises, real-life or planned, Eisenhower will take lessons learned from this event to help guide future preparation, training and readiness.
| Date Taken: | 08.22.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 08.25.2022 11:30 |
| Story ID: | 427743 |
| Location: | FORT GORDON, GEORGIA, US |
| Web Views: | 478 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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