Broward County Florida Emergency Room
Credit: WLRN

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Florida high school, the emergency medicine community is once again thinking about how to improve disaster preparedness as it waits for more details to be made available on how peers responded to the tragedy that left 17 dead.

That’s not to say that medical professionals failed in Broward County: a semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle causes “a crazy amount of damage in a human body,” said Michael Redlener, MD, of Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals in New York City.

Still, in the past decade, the emergency medicine community has been working to overhaul responses in order to keep up with the tide of mass shootings. Notably, the American College of Surgeons and government groups created the Hartford Consensusafter the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and its recommendations for responding to an active shooter event remain the national standard.

“All of us have revised approaches to supply distribution, triage, and patient […]