PHILADELPHIA — As one shooting victim — then another, and another — was rushed on Saturday night to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the Philadelphia trauma hospital that sits closest to the South Street shooting, emergency responders started to worry about reaching capacity.
"Be advised — anyone with shooting victims, do not send them to Jefferson, we already have seven victims at Jefferson," an officer said over the police radio.
But when Lars Ola Sjoholm, Temple University Hospital's chief of trauma and surgical and critical care, heard of the shooting on South Street Saturday night, his first thought was one of resignation.
"Really, another one?" he recalled thinking. "This is our life. This is what we do. There's not something really special to what happened last week — this has been going on every weekend, and multiple times a week. It's terrible."
Jefferson and Penn Medicine, the hospital systems that treated the three victims who died and 11 injured in the shooting, did not make physicians available to talk about what happened. Jefferson president Rich Webster said in a statement that the efforts made Saturday night by the hospital's trauma and emergency teams were "nothing short of heroic."
But doctors across the city are familiar with the kind of stress involved in treating shooting victims.
Temple physicians treat hundreds of the city's shooting victims, carried into the ER by police, family, and friends from neighborhoods plagued by some of the city's highest crime rates. They did not treat victims from the South Street shooting, but know all too well the stress of handling multiple patients with gunshot wounds. The trauma bay has a system in place for triaging, X-raying and transfusing blood for patients as quickly as possible.
"More so now than in the past, multiple victims come in. So it's fairly routine to take care of three or four patients at the same time. Seven is unusual, but it does happen," Sjoholm said.
As shootings in the city have risen, and dealing with multiple shooting victims becomes a common occurrence in his trauma bay, Sjoholm's realized the importance of connecting with colleagues and looking for support when he's feeling overwhelmed or stressed.
"You seek support among the people that are in the same game, so to speak. Otherwise, you have to just deal with it," he said.
"We need to get the guns off the street," he continued. "It seems like the threshold to use these guns is going down, more and more. It really is a crisis, and it has to be dealt with."
