with our patients. I didn’t know anyone; I had one nurse who does split time in Melfort, I knew her, and I do know the nurse practitioner who was with me, but the rest around me were just doing their jobs. “Everybody functioned really well because it was chaos. I was in a room that wasn’t set up for trauma, but everybody made it work. Everybody rose to the occasion.” Dr. Strydom also remembers arriving in Tisdale to witness a swirling, bustling team effort involving physicians, nurses and staff. “It was incredibly busy. They actually opened the doors as we walked up and they had gowns and gloves. Somebody must have notified them that we were on the way so they showed us to the rooms where they needed more help, so we went in. “Some of the patients were already stabilized, some they needed help with and we just continued to work with the teams who were busy with the acute cases to help with the stabilization. As things go in trauma, you stabilize, reassess and reassess, and you wait for labs to come back, X-rays to come back, and you discuss it. “Some physicians were involved in coordinating the transport while others were working in groups to stabilize the patients and discuss the various findings of the individual patients.”
The night brought back memories for Dr. Richardson, who did, indeed, experience traumatic situations in South Africa, including two bus crashes. The sense of collegiality that exists among physicians in east-central Saskatchewan went a long way to easing an intense situation, she said. “I had two critical incidents like this back home. Each one involved a bus and each one had young people,” she said. “The second one, which was just before I came to Canada, we worked in a hospital that actually had a critical incident plan in place. Everybody knew our roles and we rehearsed it and it still didn’t even go as well as this did. “It was like we’d been doing this all our lives. It’s like we get an incident like this every other week. People arrived, they picked up whatever role needed to be picked up and did it beautifully. We had tons of support locally and it was fantastic to get that amount of physician support because we needed it.”
‘This is bigger than we expected’ Like the medical teams in Melfort and Tisdale, no one in Nipawin, about 30 kilometres north of the crash site, knew what to expect at first. After receiving a call alerting her to the potential crisis, Dr. Bronwyn Carroll, medical staff leader, arrived at the Nipawin Hospital to find three other physicians and herself. Two physicians at the clinic next door were ready to help, and she was able to contact two more to come in.
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YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO ASK. ALL OF A SUDDEN YOUR TEAM JUST FORMED OUT OF THE CHAOS, ESSENTIALLY, AND WE WENT TOGETHER WITH OUR PATIENTS ... I WAS IN A ROOM THAT WASN’T SET UP FOR TRAUMA, BUT EVERYBODY MADE IT WORK. EVERYBODY ROSE TO THE OCCASION. Dr. Jordan Wingate
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SMA DIGEST | SUMMER 2018