Opinion: Health care providers are unrecognized victims of mass killings. We’re doing little to support them
The night a gunman opened fire on a crowd of 20,000 at a Las Vegas music concert, Dr. Kevin Menes was in charge of the emergency department at Sunrise Hospital. “I was pulling people five or six at a time out of patrol cars, pickup trucks, ambulances, you name it,” he recalled after the mass killing.
His team cared for about 250 of the more than 850 victims, performing 28 damage-control surgeries and 67 general surgeries in less than 24 hours.
“We did everything we could,” he said.
Menes is one of many U.S. clinicians who have treated victims of mass shootings. A team of researchers with the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare is now studying their experiences, mining for insights to buoy a workforce routinely exposed to trauma.
While their
