This Is What Makes Them Heroes

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2024

The reality is, any hospital or medical center already has a game plan for dealing with a mass-casualty event, whether it’s natural or man-made—tornadoes, for example, or plane crashes. 

There are times, however, when dealing with those plans run headlong into the ability to believe the reality unfolding in front of your eyes.

For a brief moment on Feb. 14, that was Charlie Shields’ reality. The CEO of University Health and its Truman Medical Center was aghast at the first reports of a mass shooting following the Chiefs Super Bowl celebration parade outside of Union Station, just a few hundred yards from the hospital’s emergency room.

“It started with disbelief … so many of us couldn’t believe what we were seeing or hearing; a mass casualty on what was supposed to be one of the best days for Kansas City. Then, almost immediately, our staff turned to preparing for those injured,” Shields said.

And that was as real as it gets. “This,” he says, “is what we’re trained to do.”

Probably not in the training program was having a health-system CEO in the parking lot as wounded parade-goers were wheeled in from ambulances, but there was Shields outside the door, monitoring their arrival, as TV cameras tracked the arrivals. 

University Health received most of the adults hit by stray bullets from a confrontation outside the parking garage at Union Station, just seconds after the end of the celebration and rally. One woman died in that barrage of bullets, and 22 people—more than half of them children—suffered gunshot wounds.

Two days after the incident, two people remained in critical condition at University Health, while one juvenile remained hospitalized of the 12 people originally taken to Children’s Mercy—11 of whom were between the ages of 6 and 15. 

Seven other people were treated for injuries suffered as people attempted to flee the shooting area.

Both hospitals, along with Saint Luke’s on the Plaza, went into emergency-response mode while the sirens were still blaring outside Union Station just before 1:50 p.m. the day of the parade. 

Shields applauded the quick response from his team.

“The trauma surgeons and staff, all of those in the Emergency Department, security, every clinical and non-clinical staff member dropped what they were doing to support, the Behavioral Health professionals, chaplains, environmental services, the Public Relations team and so many more leaped into action,” he said.

But even before that, he said, physicians and nurses who were at aid stations on the scene, expecting to handle intoxicated people and minor injuries, immediately became first-responders to one of the worst mass-casualty events in Kansas City history. 

“Every single person involved stepped up. It was a horribly difficult day for those victims and their families, and we were there for them. 100 percent. All in,” Shields said. This was a traumatic event for all of us, and everyone whose day of celebration turned into a day of tragedy.

But it’s also a time when our health system can be proud of our role in this,” he said. “This is who we are. This is what we do.”

Officials from Children’s Mercy and Saint Luke’s did not respond to requests for comment about details of their planning processes. 

Like Saint Luke’s, University Health is a Level 1 Trauma Center, which means it meets stringent requirements for resources, staffing and preparation for such events. Those centers must provide 24-hour coverage by nearly every surgical and medical specialty, continuing education of trauma team members, research, community outreach, participation in a comprehensive performance improvement program, and meeting minimum requirements for annual volume.  It also includes an investment in equipment, additional supplies and access to additional blood and blood products, as well as sufficient numbers of qualified trauma surgeons and staff.

In University Health’s case, that added up to more than 1,600 trauma admissions last year alone, hospital officials said. Those include everything from serious falls, motorcycle or motor vehicle crashes, to assaults. 

It takes a particular pride in moving patients from the trauma bay to operating room. While the national average is about an hour, officials said, University Health’s average time is 12 minutes, and has been as low as three minutes.

“Obviously, this was a very challenging day for the city, a very traumatic day not only for the city but also for our staff,” Shields said. His chief medical officer, Mark Steele, added that while being a Level 1 trauma center meant that the training had been executed for this kind of thing, “we obviously hope it never happens. We were actually very well prepared; we had enough notice that we were going to get some patients.”

The timing also helped, Steele said.

“Being during the day, we had a lot of professionals, a lot of physicians here present, and they discontinued starting new surgical cases so those surgeons and anesthesiologist would be available for new patients. We also called in additional people to come in and help out, and additional off duty surgeons came in from home.”

Nearby on Hospital Hill, chief nursing officer Stephanie Meyer echoed the praise for staffers at Children’s Mercy.

“We want to think all the teams on site today,” she said as night fell after the shooting. “Children’s Mercy had specific staff down at the event so we could proactively prepare for an event such as this. We want to thank all for being professional and calm and coming into the situation with ease and grace.”

The day , she said, “has been extremely disheartening, but these are things we always need to be prepared for. We are also going to have to make sure we stay in tune with the care they need after the violence they’ve seen. We’re going to work through that with the ones we’ve treated, and had our office of well-being help our teams with what they have encountered.”

Part of the challenge in a response she said, was the impact on other patients already at the hospital or on their way in. “Situations like illness or surgery, some we reprioritize according to our mass-casualty plan,” she said. “We had to pause some of the surgeries we would have done normally, and had to mobilize resources to take care of patients and their families in ER.

With all of the wounded expected to recover, she was asked how the children were responding.

“Fear,” Meyer simply answered. “That’s the one word I would use to describe what we saw when they came to us.”