HJNO Mar/Apr 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAR / APR 2025 17 that day instead of being in a highly tense situation. Making sure that the leadership knows to round after the fact is one way that we can stay ahead of the curve. Maslanka From a protocol standpoint, you have to have a protocol that your staff is familiar with, and the more you can build into the protocol that people are used to doing, the better the protocol works. Editor But there's a difference in this from just “your normal” ... I feel it in the room, and I hear it. Dr. Greiffenstein, you were in New York for 911. I lived there, too. There's a shock feeling that happens to a city when a terror event occurs. It affects everyone. Did you get re-triggered going through this episode? Did it feel different for you than when you were in New York and went through that terror attack? Greiffenstein I think that for me, and I think for most of us who go into this field with trauma surgery, we appreciate being the ones to respond to this. I don't want something like this to happen, but when it happens, I want to be the one to be there. I think it's that mentality. Have you ever watched a hockey goalie practice, where you just sit there and a puck is getting thrown at them, and they're just responding to one thing after another? And they're always calm, they're always just looking at the next right thing to do while keeping one eye on the big scene. You don't have the luxury to panic. You know to put that aside. That's useless to me when I'm in the middle of something like this. It could be a mass casualty. It can sometimes be one patient who has multiple injuries, and I'm in the operating room try- ing to figure out where the fastest bleeding is coming from— is it from the pelvis, or from the chest, or from the neck — and trying to figure out where to do the cut next. I think it's the mentality of the people who are here that we're ducks to water. Editor Thanks for being ducks, by the way. What advice would you give to other trauma centers preparing for similar events? Greiffenstein Well, one aspect of it is more than advice. What we need to do and what we do as trauma centers, is go to the community. One of our programs is the Rural Trauma Development Course, which we bring to the hospitals around the community. We sit down and meet with the entire hospital — emergency room physicians, radiology — we go through all of these things and all these centers, and we help them develop their protocols. We help them put as much as they can in place, because this happened here. There could be a tour bus that crashes in the middle of a field near LaPlace, and the nearest hospital may not be the place where all of those patients usually go. More than advice, I think that we have a responsibility to the region as a regional trauma center to help themprepare to get those patients stabilized and send them to us. Maslanka From an emergency management perspective, nobody wants to talk about disaster, or terrorism, or think that that's going to happen. But I think we live in a time where hospitals have to take a look at that and think to themselves, it's not a matter of “if,” it's a matter of “when,” and decide that they're going to be prepared and take the steps to be prepared — not fall into the trap of having a plan that sits on the shelf and collects dust that nobody really looks at or nobody really knows what it contains. It needs to be a plan that's shared and a plan that's practiced. Elder I would just add that we talked about the communication piece earlier in the relationships, and I would just remind you that it takes a village. When this occurred, I used 20 years of emergency medical services, emergency management relationships, and touched people all over to help with what we needed to make happen. Whether it was local EMS, local health department, the state, the feds — people that I had worked with over the years and that we work with routinely. In times of crisis, you're able to reach out to those folks, and they become your friend. They bring their resources to help. It worked both ways. We helped with the health department and the city; they helped with us. Really, that's that all-hazard group coming together to make that work. I think because we're in New Orleans, unfortu- nately we have to deal with things like this a lot. For other reasons — like hurricanes, snowstorms, we just went through — where we have to set up incident command. We deal with our local and state partners and the feds really routinely because of this, because of the big events that we have in town, like the Super Bowl. We're used to talking with each other; we know those people and have those con- tacts. That way, when something happens, you're phoning a friend, and they're bringing their resources to help the group. For those that are looking at this in other places, it's all about what plan you have. How do you work that plan? How do you drill it, refine it? But it's how you evolve everybody else in that plan as well that will ultimately make it successful. Maslanka Being neighborly. Greiffenstein And being receptive. I think one of the things is looking at “what happens if …?” And then if the questions are more often open, rather than answered in a protocolized fashion, then ask for help. We're a great resource, and I hope that other hospitals around the region reach out to us more, because we're here to help. And I think it is Liz who does a great job in helping out being that outreach person too. Maslanka If anybody is interested in getting help with putting plans together, we would love to work with them.