It ' s appalling that this was even necessary
Some police-affiliated docs discuss what to do if a wackjob with a gun attacks your hospital.Defining [active shooter] incidents as situations in which “an individual [is] actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has identified 160 discrete incidents that occurred between 2000 and 2013, in which 486 people were killed and an additional 557 were woun ded.6 In the first half of that period, there were an average of 6.4 active-shooter incidents per year; the number more than doubled, to 16.4, in the latter half of the period. The most recently released FBI data reveal that the rate increased to 20 incidents per year in 2014 and 2015.It turns out that hospitals are a fairly popular place for this to happen. And people can ' t just run and hide. At any given time, some people are in surgery, others are unable to get out of bed and are even tethered to machines. And their caregivers can ' t flee and abandon them.These authors suggest that hospitals should at least consider restricting access, making visitors pass through metal detectors and X-ray screening, and limiting them to specific areas with color-coded wrist bands. Few hospitals do that now, I ' m happy to say, and I think it would be an overreaction. These incidents aren ' t exactly rare -- 154 in ten years according to one cited study -- but there are about 5,500 hospitals in the U.S. so your individual risk is low. Somebody wh...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
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