ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Nearly 30 people were sent to Rochester’s four area hospitals for injuries after a FlixBus crashed Thursday morning on its way from New York City to Niagara Falls.
Monroe County Sheriff’s Deputy Fowler referred to the incident as a "significant accident" at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Passengers were treated for a range of injuries, including broken bones, head injuries, injuries to the torso and injuries to their extremities. One passenger, who was sent to the hospital in critical condition, has died. Many others have been discharged, according to the University of Rochester Medical Center and Rochester Regional Health.
Strong Memorial Hospital, a level one trauma center for the region, cared for 16 of those patients — 13 originally, before three others were transferred to its care later in the morning.
Dr. Michael Kamali, chair of Emergency Medicine at the University of Rochester, says, the hospital staff trains for these incidents all year long.
“Training is where you start," Kamali said. "You look at past events that we have dealt with here in our community, and you look at events around the country. And we talk to people who have experienced those, as well. So, there are some protocols, handbooks, if you will, after action reports, for these events that we take a look at, that we try and learn from, and then we do some training with that."
He explains that trainings involve the consideration of many hypotheticals, learning from experience, and hands on collaboration. While internal trainings happen throughout the year, a few also correspond with many of the EMT and law enforcement crews that responded to the scene on Thursday morning.
“When we call it an MCI, or mass casualty incident, many steps go into planning for those types of events," Kamali explained. "That, of course, involves law enforcement, fire and EMS, and they are out in the field responding to those patients and then coordinating where to send patients for us. We got notifications that there was a significant event. And knowing that we are at the level one trauma center for the entire region, we know that we're going to have to take any and all critical patients that come to us, certainly within reason. If it becomes way too much, yes, we do know the resources that other hospitals have and patients can be directed to those areas."
It’s more than just the nurses and doctors who participate at the hospital. Everyone staffed has a role when tragedy strikes in our communities.
“We have our public safety personnel who help with crowd control and ensuring that our environment is safe while we work. We have our registration staff that is trying to identify patients, but also assigning them a name,” he explained. “It's our environmental services that are working incredibly hard, incredibly fast to keep the environment clean, but then to turn over rooms so that we are immediately ready for another patient. It's our techs, it's our nurses, it's our doctors, it’s our nurse practitioners, our physicians assistants, our transporters — every piece of that is one part of the machine that makes it all work. So when we're planning for events, we involve all of those teams into. It's basically questioning, what would we do, how would we respond and what is needed to make that work. And at a place like strong, you have a lot of resources that you can pull in from a lot of different areas. And we had that certainly at 7:38 in the morning.”
Exercises can be extensive and must be well-thought out to help prepare the crews for the unpredictable.
“The exercises that we go through and planning for such events sometimes are real world type of exercises involving EMS involving, fire and law enforcement, where we have mock patients that are coming to the hospital and then we determine where we need to send those patients. Sometimes the exercises are also tabletop, where we will take we have a list of patients, and then we're calling the operating room saying we have one, two, three, four or five. What are you going to do in the operating room to ensure that we can take care of all these patients, and we try and push that to see what are the limits,” Kamali added. “We do the trials of what would happen if multiple patients would come in and we look at it from different angles. How might that affect different areas of the hospital? How would that affect the operating rooms? Would we have enough teams, enough space, enough rooms to handle those patients? Would we have enough space in the emergency department? What if it was a large influx of pediatric patients? How did we do that?”
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office agrees with medical professionals that Thursday’s execution was a success. Now they’re all using this incident as a learning opportunity to prepare for the inevitable next time.
"Some of our thought processes are like, what if that happened at 2 in the morning? What would we do then? Who would we call? We have protocols in place, but we'll test those sometimes on a tabletop exercise. How would that work? Would we have enough? Would it have been sufficient for the events of yesterday? And we continue to look at that, continue to try to stress, or over stress, the system to see how it responds and to see what we can do, because we always want to be prepared, because unfortunately, there will be a next time,” he said. “We continue these efforts, continue to do the work, learn from things, move on. Thankfully, yesterday went well, unfortunately, we know the outcomes of one of the patients. And some of the patients are still in the hospital.”