Patient Experience

How I Heard

I remember waking up a few minutes after 5:00 that morning. I turned on the TV, and that’s when I heard the news of a mass shooting at Pulse and that victims were being taken to Orlando Health Orlando Regional Medical Center (ORMC). I sat up, heard that there were 20 casualties so far, sent a few texts to my team and was out the door within 10 minutes. The clock in my car said 5:38 when I arrived in the hospital parking garage.

Walking into the hospital, I remember thinking, This one is real, and I said a prayer asking for strength and guidance, because I knew I would be serving people who really needed my help that day.

A crowd of people stood at the front entrance of ORMC, which was under lockdown, and I’d learn later that they were the friends and families of the victims looking for their loved ones. 

And instead of the friendly faces of our Guest Service team members at the front desk, I saw a law enforcement officer I didn’t recognize, standing guard, dressed in SWAT gear and holding an automatic weapon.

Synopsis

On a normal day, my team does everything we can to delight our patients and guests, and make them comfortable in the hospital. We manage the front desks and waiting areas within the hospital. We oversee the volunteer and pet therapy programs. And we partner with the leadership teams to help them provide the best hospital experience possible. 

But June 12, 2016, was no normal day. By 6:30 am we opened a large conference room to convene the family and friends. It’s important to note that ORMC is just a few blocks north of the Pulse nightclub, and the community resources to manage the families weren’t set up until later that day. So we became the gathering place for anyone looking for a victim, whether they came to us or were still down at Pulse.

Preparation

In the past, I have served on Hospital Incident Command as the logistics officer, providing needed services and supplies as the incident requires. During routine drills, we assign a gathering room for the families of the victims and provide creature comforts such as blankets, water and food. We provide staff to manage the area and provide updates as needed.

Response

We began gathering the families at ORMC before dawn on Sunday and were with them throughout the day while they waited, hoping and praying for miracles and staying connected constantly to their cell phones. We provided nourishment, emotional support and blankets, and gave away so many cell phone chargers that we eventually cleaned out the entire supply from our gift shops.

They all wanted to know one thing ... where their loved ones were.  Were they in the ORMC emergency room or were they among the 49 victims who lost their lives at Pulse? We worked diligently to comfort them and keep them informed, all the while knowing that many of them would receive the most devastating news of their lives before it was over. And among those whose loved ones were in fact at ORMC, even the BEST news they would receive was that their loved ones had been shot and traumatized. I'll never forget the desperation, anguish and raw agony I saw and heard that Sunday and Monday.

While we cared for the families and loved ones, great efforts were going on behind the scenes to identify the patients brought to our trauma center. In the first wave, we took in 36 patients in 36 minutes that morning, so it was extremely busy in the emergency room. Some patients could self-identify, some had legitimate IDs, some didn’t have identification, some were unconscious and some had fake IDs. 

Meanwhile back in the family room, we asked those gathered to send us a current picture of who they were looking for, and we worked with the FBI to match up those photos with the victims at both ORMC and at Pulse. It took the FBI several hours to ID and clear everyone. During those hours, we learned that instead of 20 victims originally reported dead at Pulse, there were in fact 49, and the tension and resignation of the 250 people in the family room was intense.

Around 11:00 am, one of our trauma surgeons came into the room and read a list of names and conditions of the patients we had at ORMC and a list of those at another local hospital. After the list was read, we took families out to be reunited with their loved ones, and told the group left that we still had four patients we had not yet identified. That’s when everyone realized we had many of the families of the 49 victims who died at Pulse. Days later when we went back and reviewed the log of who we had in the room, we discovered that we had cared for the families of 48 of the 49 victims who died.

We continued to care for this group while local officials organized their family center. During that time, I was given a list with five names – all were victims transported to the trauma center who hadn’t survived their injuries – and I was asked to gather their families. These were families we had cared for all day, and we had built trusting relationships with them. The FBI wanted to begin notifying those families who were there. The agency has a notification protocol that they follow in circumstances like this and it didn’t include us. However, we felt very strongly that if the notifications were to happen at the hospital, we needed to be involved. We insisted that as a Level One Trauma Center, our team is, sadly, quite adept at giving that type of news in a compassionate and caring way. They eventually agreed, and over the next two hours, I brought the families in, one at a time, to the ORMC boardroom, where our chief operating officer, Dr. Jamal Hakim, and the FBI agents told them that their sons, husbands, brothers and friends had in fact passed away at Pulse that morning.

We cared for the rest of the families until around 3:30 pm, when we walked them to the community family room set up at a hotel near the hospital. And we said goodbye to them.

Lessons Learned

When we have had drills in the past and needed a family room, we designated an area and made arrangements to deliver water and blankets. We now know there is much more needed than just a location and basic creature comforts.

The families we cared for needed emotional support, so we needed grief counselors. They needed spiritual support, so we needed chaplains.  They needed medical support, so we needed EMTs, nurses and paramedics. And this group needed cultural support — it had been Latin night at Pulse, and we needed Spanish-speaking interpreters.

Another key learning was that while the clinical activity at the hospital returned to normal relatively quickly — we cared for car accident victims around 10:00 am in the trauma center, and we had nearly 500 other patients in our units that day — the aftermath of the Pulse incident went on for months.

On Monday morning, we recognized that the families of our patients needed help navigating their new circumstances, so we assigned non-clinical managers to each family to help them with everything from travel arrangements and accommodations to guiding them through the law enforcement process and community support system that was put in place. We did this for 10 days until we had fewer than 10 Pulse patients in house, and our nursing and care coordination teams could take over.

We received so many requests from VIPs and other concerned citizens who wanted to visit and comfort the victims and our team — this went on for about a month — that we called in support from our corporate areas, including community and government relations, marketing and our foundation to help manage them.

And we were absolutely overwhelmed and humbled by the incredible generosity and acts of compassion provided by the community and the country. We set up a team in our volunteers office to manage the daily deliveries of cards, gifts, food and flowers.  

What We Changed

A few days after the incident, I brought my team together to recap June 12^th while it was still fresh in our minds. We put together a 12-page document detailing what worked and what could have been improved. We now have a full family room policy based on our experience, and a detailed package of information and supplies are ready in each patient experience office in our hospitals. We know the support that is needed in addition to our team and the necessary creature comforts — interpreters, emergency medicine clinicians, spiritual and emotional counselors, community and law enforcement representatives, and scheduled communication from hospital officials, to name a few.

Conclusion

I have never been prouder of my team, of the leaders of ORMC and Orlando Health, and of the clinicians and other professionals I serve with than on June 12, 2016.  Many of the family members we cared for that day received the most devastating news possible, and despite their terrible losses, they expressed their gratefulness for the care and compassion we provided them that day. It was an incredible honor to serve them on a day I will never forget.

Key Takeaways

We never imagined that Orlando would be the location of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. We never imagined that it would happen a few blocks away from ORMC. We never imagined that the ORMC family room would be the gathering place for the loved ones of all the victims of the tragedy, not just those victims brought to our hospital. But we were prepared thanks to disaster drills that happened routinely. We were prepared to manage what we knew, and our team was nimble enough to make adjustments throughout the day to ensure that we provided the best experience possible under the circumstances.