The trauma team at Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center treated six victims of a shooting that happened Tuesday at a Kentucky high school 100 miles away, according to The Tennessean.
The incident marked the hospital's first experience treating a school shooting, according to Rick Miller, MD, director of Vanderbilt's trauma unit. "We can handle huge loads of patients, and we have the capacity to take care of a lot of people."
Five medical helicopters VUMC uses in Kentucky and Tennessee transported five wounded students from Marshall County High School in Benton, Ky., to the medical center for emergency treatment Tuesday morning, according to a separate report from The Tennessean.
One of the five male students, a 15-year-old from Benton, was pronounced dead at Vanderbilt. A 15-year-old girl died at the school. The other four male students who were flown to the hospital range from ages 15 to 18. They remain in critical but stable condition at VUMC's adult hospital and are expected to survive.
The sixth patient, a female student, was brought to Vanderbilt's children's hospital in stable condition Tuesday evening.
The hospital's staff was fully trained and prepared to treat the patients as they arrived and had multiple trauma surgeons on hand, said Dr. Miller and Oscar Guillamondegui, MD, medical director of VUMC's trauma unit. Similar-sized hospitals should be prepared to handle these tasks, given the "uptick of these mass casualties across the country," Dr. Miller said.