Selected Podcast
A Children’s Hospital’s Battle Against Gun Violence: Part 2
Question and Answer with the Le Bonheur Trauma Department
Featured Speaker:
Learn more about Regan Williams, MD
Regan Williams, MD | Sam Sheppard | Anissa Revels, BSN, RN
Regan Williams, MD is the Medical Director, Trauma Services Associate Professor, The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Departments of Surgery and Pediatrics.Learn more about Regan Williams, MD
Sam Sheppard is a trauma decision support analyst for Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Sheppard has served in this role for over 10 years. Before serving in her current role, Sheppard was an emergency department technician at Le Bonheur. Sheppard is certified by the American Trauma Society. She is currently enrolled at Dyersburg State Community College to earn her nursing degree with an expected graduation date of May 2022.
Anissa Revels received her Master’s degree in Nursing Leadership from the University of North Alabama in 2018. She is the Trauma Program Director of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital Level I Pediatric Trauma Center. She has been a nurse for 19 years and has served in this role for 7 years. She is dedicated to making sure all pediatric trauma patients receive the best quality care while at Le Bonheur hospital. She is currently an ATLS Coordinator and TNCC Instructor.
Anissa Revels received her Master’s degree in Nursing Leadership from the University of North Alabama in 2018. She is the Trauma Program Director of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital Level I Pediatric Trauma Center. She has been a nurse for 19 years and has served in this role for 7 years. She is dedicated to making sure all pediatric trauma patients receive the best quality care while at Le Bonheur hospital. She is currently an ATLS Coordinator and TNCC Instructor.
Transcription:
Bill Klaproth: In 2020, 136 children came to Le Bonheur Children's Hospital suffering from gunshot wounds. That's nearly 50 more children than were seen in 2019, an increase of 52% that has continued into 2021. Gun violence has been identified by Le Bonheur's level one trauma center as a pandemic within a pandemic with catastrophic impacts on children.
The numbers are alarming, but it's important to remember that behind every one of these statistics is a child and a family left reeling from the effects of this trauma. Here to help us better understand this issue and the partnerships arising to address it are members of Le Bonheur's level one trauma center, Anissa Revels, Sam Sheppard and Dr. Regan Williams.
This is The Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children's Hospital. I'm Bill Klaproth. Anissa, Sam and Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time.
And Dr. Regan Williams, You are the Le Bonheur Medical Director of Trauma Services. You are also an associate professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. You are often the acting surgeon when the needs arise. Can you tell us what a gunshot wound does to a child's body?
Dr. Regan Williams: Sure. Thanks for having us. Unfortunately, we all too often see children come in after firearm injuries. And most of the children we see actually have firearm injuries to the extremities, so legs or arms. And those oftentimes will go through the skin and the soft tissue and sometimes affect the bones and the blood vessels. When they affect the bones and blood vessels, that truly will require surgery to repair that damage. But if it just goes through the skin and the fat, those can just be cleaned up and washed out and the patients can sometimes even go home that day.
The more concerning area to get injured as if you're injured in the torso, so the chest or the abdomen. That will almost always require surgery to heal the injuries to either the lung, the blood vessels, sometimes the heart or the intestines, liver, spleen and kidneys. All of those things can be injured or one of those things can be injured. It just depends on the path of the bullet, how close the patient was to the perpetrator and how many shots were fired. The patients that go to the operating room that have injuries to the chest and abdomen are going to come into the hospital immediately go to the operating for exploration and repairing any of the injuries they may have.
Bill Klaproth: Wow. That is something. So then what are the typical treatment and surgery options? Like, I suppose it runs the gamut from minor to, as you said, a gunshot wound to the torso would require major surgery. Is that right?
Dr. Regan Williams: Yeah, it does. There's a wide range. Again, fortunately, probably 50% of our patients really have minor injuries. But the physical parts can heal, it's actually the mental, emotional toll that is harder to heal. But for the other 50%, some of them require repair of major blood vessels, that can sometimes be a three- to six-hour surgery. Patients that have injuries to the abdomen sometimes will injure multiple organs. And that can go anywhere from five to six to seven hours. And occasionally, we even have patients that have both of those injuries. So you can imagine if you have a injury to the abdomen, that takes four or five hours to repair all those injuries, but then you also got shot in the leg and you damage one of your blood vessels, that takes a couple more hours. So we occasionally have kids that come in and they're in the operating room for 10 to 12 hours just to get all of their injuries repaired. Now, that's not the more common. The more common is you come in with a very minor injury. You're treated in the emergency room and you're able to go home.
Bill Klaproth: So on TV and movies, we see people get shot in some of these super action heroes and they're still able to move and function and whatever. It's like, "Okay. Wow. Look at that guy." But that's not reality, right? So can you explain to us why it's so vital for everyone to understand the harm that a firearm injury can do to the body?
Dr. Regan Williams: Yes. So you're right. The TV makes it sound so glamorous when you get shy. But it's not glamorous at all. It's often days to weeks in the hospital. Some of our patients survive their injuries, some of our patients die. That doesn't happen very frequently, but it certainly can happen. And that is the ultimate worst outcome. But some of our patients end up being paralyzed. So if you injure the spinal cord anywhere along its course, then you can be paralyzed either with your legs, your arms. You know, that's something that these patients definitely live with forever and has a lot of other complications associated with it.
And unfortunately, in the last two to three years, we've really had an increase in children being shot and having spinal cord injuries that leave them paralyzed.
Bill Klaproth: That is just so tough to hear. So we've been talking a lot about what happens physically when a child gets shot, but what are the long-term emotional and mental impacts for these children and families?
Dr. Regan Williams: Yeah. So, as were admitting and seeing more patients with firearm injuries that, first, this wasn't just happening to the patient, but it was really affecting the entire family. And then the second part is, is that sometimes sewing up their wounds on the leg is the easy part of taking care of them. The harder part is convincing them to go back to the house or the park or the street where they were injured, to leave the house to go to school. We've had kids that we can't even get them back to see us in the clinic because they're so afraid to leave their house because of the incidence, that they won't leave. And so that becomes a real problem because it's much easier for me sew two pieces of skin back together than to really build resilience in a young child so that they can overcome this horrible accident that's occurred.
Because of that, we work with a group from the University of Memphis. We brought in mental health counselors, who see all of our patients and their families and provide support services as well as techniques and conversations to help them overcome the mental and emotional toll that one of these incidents brings.
Bill Klaproth: And that support after the injury, after the body, the physical body has healed, the mental aspects, the support for that really is critical at that point, right?
Dr. Regan Williams: It is. And one thing that we've identified now that we have these mental health counselors, is that in the past, when a patient had a firearm injury, healed all their physical parts, but then went home and started having symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which are not sleeping, not wanting to do normal activities, being irritable, lashing out, depression. Those things would happen, you know, 30 to 60 days after the incident and then they would seek care and then they would start counseling.
We've realized that now we actually start counseling them as soon as they come in. So rather than wait for them to have symptoms, we're giving them the tools they need to process what occurred and to build resilience so that they never develop post-traumatic stress disorder, that we're giving them the tools they need immediately.
And we think that this is going to help them to get back to normal quicker and then to avoid the longterm psychosocial impacts of a firearm injury.
Bill Klaproth: Right. So being proactive in that emotional and mental support. Starting that now, it sounds like it really makes sense to go, "Hey, this is going to affect you mentally. You have to be prepared for this," right? "Your leg is going to heal, but your mind, we've got to work on that to help you understand this and give you the tools to manage what's going to come after." Is that kind of it?
Dr. Regan Williams: Exactly. Dr. Williams.
Bill Klaproth: thank you so much for that.
And Sam, let me ask you now, you are the Le Bonheur trauma data analyst. So you have been pouring over the numbers, working to truly understand the impact of gun violence on our community. Why do you think gun violence has risen so steeply in the last year?
Sam Sheppard: I think it's COVID-related. You saw a lot of school closures and, with that, children were left at home, which allowed them easier access to firearms, and they had a lot of free time on their hands. Poor conflict resolution also I think is another problem with that.
Bill Klaproth: Right. So the pandemic certainly made a lot of things that were already bad worse. There's no question about that. And the stresses and the strains of the pandemic. It's kind of easy to see why things that could have been resolved, normally escalated into, unfortunately, gun violence. So can you talk about the efforts happening at Le Bonheur in partnership with the community to try to curb this increase?
Sam Sheppard: Yes, there is a community walk against gun violence. It's a group of people here at Le Bonheur as well as throughout the community, Shelby County and Memphis, and they partner, they meet monthly and they plan for quarterly walks. And those walks are in the communities where they're seeing the highest amount of gun violence.
Bill Klaproth: Absolutely. And then, you know, data is so important in our everyday lives, so we can truly understand why things are happening. What pieces of data do you think are most important for the community to understand.
Sam Sheppard: Well, we looked at a lot of different data elements. One of those things is age. We look at age because a lot of times people think that this is just in the older age bracket that you see this, but we're seeing children under five years old that are being shot. So we like to look at age. We look at the injury type, like if it's an assault versus accidental. If it's accidental, like a child found a gun, the gun accidentally went off, or if it was an assault. And we also look at the location of the injury. That way, we can plan injury prevention. Whenever we find those different areas, we like to go out and teach the community about gun safety and things of that nature.
Bill Klaproth: Well, teaching and educating people about gun safety certainly can help in the prevention of firearm injury. So thank you for that, Sam. Anissa, as the Le Bonheur trauma program director, you work every day to make sure that your team is prepared to offer every life-saving measure possible when the call comes in regarding a gunshot victim. So let me ask you, how is Le Bonheur's team prepared to handle gunshot wound cases.
Anissa Revels: Absolutely. Thank you, Bill, for the question. Our physicians attend classes. They attend a class called advanced trauma life support, and it's designed to teach systematic and a concise approach to the care of trauma patients. In these courses, they listen to didactic training and then they perform hands-on training, that allows the student to apply what they've learned to actually practicing the skills that's needed to help to save a life.
Our nurses pretty much go through the same type of courses, where they receive teaching and hands-on training, except their training and teaching is on the level where nurses are given the skills that are allowed for them to actually take care of patients in the trauma setting. The nurses here most work at least a year in our ED before they attend those courses. And once they've worked a year, they will be assigned to the trauma nurse course, which like I say, provides them with knowledge and technique for the nurse to use in taking care of our trauma patients.
There are other courses that we encourage our nurses and physicians to attend, such as the ASSET course, which is for our surgeons. ASSET stands for Advanced Surgical Skills for Exposure in Trauma. And our nurses can take the ATCN course, which is our Advanced Trauma Care Nurse course. Also, we provide mock code scenarios to our team that's done periodically throughout the year and this observes their strengths and weaknesses during a trauma resuscitation.
So we may do a scenario for gunshot wounds, a case for motor vehicle crashes and respiratory distress, just a variety different things that we see that come through our doors on a daily basis. After we perform those mock codes, we do debrief with our teams to share with them what was done really good during the resuscitation and what areas that we need work on. That provides them that actual in-house training and practice for us to be able to take care of those gunshot wound cases that come through the doors.
Bill Klaproth: So Annisa, you've just described basically a lot of team members, a lot of things going on. So can you describe the different team members' roles?
Anissa Revels: I can. So we usually have about nine to ten personnels that are in the trauma bay rooms to receive a patient. That consists of the emergency room department physician, our trauma surgeons who both are considered our team leaders. So they will organize and provide instructions throughout the resuscitation. We have three trauma nurses that are in the room as well. One nurse does the documentation. So she's documenting and writing down everything that's going on in the room. The other two nurses, one is a medication nurse who provides all of the medications that the patient may need. And the second nurse is a procedure nurse. So any type of procedures that the physician is requesting, that nurse will take care of those duties.
We also have respiratory therapists and our CRNA or anesthesia who provides basically our airway support for the patient. There are two EDTs, which are emergency department technicians who will take care of placing the patient on monitors, removing their clothing and performing CPR if that's needed. We also have a pharmacist that's in the room that will provide all of the medications that are being requested by the physicians to give to the patient. So that's basically the team and what their roles are when taking care of those gunshot wound patients or any type of trauma patient that comes into our hospital.
Bill Klaproth: Well, it seems like timing seems to be a critical element of care in cases like these, especially when you're talking about all of these team members. There is an urgency. Can you talk about Le Bonheur's preparedness to take swift action?
Anissa Revels: Absolutely. We have three activation levels that have certain criteria that must be met for us to determine how to prepare our teams. Each activation level has a level of important or urgency to them. So once the hospital receives notification from our EMS partners or a referring hospital, based off of what those reports are to tell us what type of patient we get coming through the doors, we will then activate the correct activation level.
Once that level has been determined, the notification is sent out to our teams. We have assigned team members and departments who know to respond to our emergency department within a defined timeframe, depending on the activation level and the estimated time of arrival for that patient.
So depending on what that call coming in, let's us know how severe this patient is, we'll choose the correct activation level. And then once that notification is sent out, those team members know exactly how fast and how quick to get down to the emergency department. So we'll be ready and available to take care of that patient once they arrive through our doors.
Bill Klaproth: Annisa, thank you so much for that.
Bill Klaproth: This has been a fascinating topic and a much needed discussion. So, Anissa, Sam and Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.
Dr. Regan Williams: Thank you.
Anissa Revels: Thank you so much, Bill.
Sam Sheppard: Thank you.
Bill Klaproth: And for more information on this subject, please visit lebonheur.org/podcasts. And be sure to subscribe to the Peds Pod on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out lebonheur.org/podcast to view the full podcast library. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels.
This is The Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children's Hospital. Thanks for listening.
Bill Klaproth: In 2020, 136 children came to Le Bonheur Children's Hospital suffering from gunshot wounds. That's nearly 50 more children than were seen in 2019, an increase of 52% that has continued into 2021. Gun violence has been identified by Le Bonheur's level one trauma center as a pandemic within a pandemic with catastrophic impacts on children.
The numbers are alarming, but it's important to remember that behind every one of these statistics is a child and a family left reeling from the effects of this trauma. Here to help us better understand this issue and the partnerships arising to address it are members of Le Bonheur's level one trauma center, Anissa Revels, Sam Sheppard and Dr. Regan Williams.
This is The Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children's Hospital. I'm Bill Klaproth. Anissa, Sam and Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time.
And Dr. Regan Williams, You are the Le Bonheur Medical Director of Trauma Services. You are also an associate professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. You are often the acting surgeon when the needs arise. Can you tell us what a gunshot wound does to a child's body?
Dr. Regan Williams: Sure. Thanks for having us. Unfortunately, we all too often see children come in after firearm injuries. And most of the children we see actually have firearm injuries to the extremities, so legs or arms. And those oftentimes will go through the skin and the soft tissue and sometimes affect the bones and the blood vessels. When they affect the bones and blood vessels, that truly will require surgery to repair that damage. But if it just goes through the skin and the fat, those can just be cleaned up and washed out and the patients can sometimes even go home that day.
The more concerning area to get injured as if you're injured in the torso, so the chest or the abdomen. That will almost always require surgery to heal the injuries to either the lung, the blood vessels, sometimes the heart or the intestines, liver, spleen and kidneys. All of those things can be injured or one of those things can be injured. It just depends on the path of the bullet, how close the patient was to the perpetrator and how many shots were fired. The patients that go to the operating room that have injuries to the chest and abdomen are going to come into the hospital immediately go to the operating for exploration and repairing any of the injuries they may have.
Bill Klaproth: Wow. That is something. So then what are the typical treatment and surgery options? Like, I suppose it runs the gamut from minor to, as you said, a gunshot wound to the torso would require major surgery. Is that right?
Dr. Regan Williams: Yeah, it does. There's a wide range. Again, fortunately, probably 50% of our patients really have minor injuries. But the physical parts can heal, it's actually the mental, emotional toll that is harder to heal. But for the other 50%, some of them require repair of major blood vessels, that can sometimes be a three- to six-hour surgery. Patients that have injuries to the abdomen sometimes will injure multiple organs. And that can go anywhere from five to six to seven hours. And occasionally, we even have patients that have both of those injuries. So you can imagine if you have a injury to the abdomen, that takes four or five hours to repair all those injuries, but then you also got shot in the leg and you damage one of your blood vessels, that takes a couple more hours. So we occasionally have kids that come in and they're in the operating room for 10 to 12 hours just to get all of their injuries repaired. Now, that's not the more common. The more common is you come in with a very minor injury. You're treated in the emergency room and you're able to go home.
Bill Klaproth: So on TV and movies, we see people get shot in some of these super action heroes and they're still able to move and function and whatever. It's like, "Okay. Wow. Look at that guy." But that's not reality, right? So can you explain to us why it's so vital for everyone to understand the harm that a firearm injury can do to the body?
Dr. Regan Williams: Yes. So you're right. The TV makes it sound so glamorous when you get shy. But it's not glamorous at all. It's often days to weeks in the hospital. Some of our patients survive their injuries, some of our patients die. That doesn't happen very frequently, but it certainly can happen. And that is the ultimate worst outcome. But some of our patients end up being paralyzed. So if you injure the spinal cord anywhere along its course, then you can be paralyzed either with your legs, your arms. You know, that's something that these patients definitely live with forever and has a lot of other complications associated with it.
And unfortunately, in the last two to three years, we've really had an increase in children being shot and having spinal cord injuries that leave them paralyzed.
Bill Klaproth: That is just so tough to hear. So we've been talking a lot about what happens physically when a child gets shot, but what are the long-term emotional and mental impacts for these children and families?
Dr. Regan Williams: Yeah. So, as were admitting and seeing more patients with firearm injuries that, first, this wasn't just happening to the patient, but it was really affecting the entire family. And then the second part is, is that sometimes sewing up their wounds on the leg is the easy part of taking care of them. The harder part is convincing them to go back to the house or the park or the street where they were injured, to leave the house to go to school. We've had kids that we can't even get them back to see us in the clinic because they're so afraid to leave their house because of the incidence, that they won't leave. And so that becomes a real problem because it's much easier for me sew two pieces of skin back together than to really build resilience in a young child so that they can overcome this horrible accident that's occurred.
Because of that, we work with a group from the University of Memphis. We brought in mental health counselors, who see all of our patients and their families and provide support services as well as techniques and conversations to help them overcome the mental and emotional toll that one of these incidents brings.
Bill Klaproth: And that support after the injury, after the body, the physical body has healed, the mental aspects, the support for that really is critical at that point, right?
Dr. Regan Williams: It is. And one thing that we've identified now that we have these mental health counselors, is that in the past, when a patient had a firearm injury, healed all their physical parts, but then went home and started having symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which are not sleeping, not wanting to do normal activities, being irritable, lashing out, depression. Those things would happen, you know, 30 to 60 days after the incident and then they would seek care and then they would start counseling.
We've realized that now we actually start counseling them as soon as they come in. So rather than wait for them to have symptoms, we're giving them the tools they need to process what occurred and to build resilience so that they never develop post-traumatic stress disorder, that we're giving them the tools they need immediately.
And we think that this is going to help them to get back to normal quicker and then to avoid the longterm psychosocial impacts of a firearm injury.
Bill Klaproth: Right. So being proactive in that emotional and mental support. Starting that now, it sounds like it really makes sense to go, "Hey, this is going to affect you mentally. You have to be prepared for this," right? "Your leg is going to heal, but your mind, we've got to work on that to help you understand this and give you the tools to manage what's going to come after." Is that kind of it?
Dr. Regan Williams: Exactly. Dr. Williams.
Bill Klaproth: thank you so much for that.
And Sam, let me ask you now, you are the Le Bonheur trauma data analyst. So you have been pouring over the numbers, working to truly understand the impact of gun violence on our community. Why do you think gun violence has risen so steeply in the last year?
Sam Sheppard: I think it's COVID-related. You saw a lot of school closures and, with that, children were left at home, which allowed them easier access to firearms, and they had a lot of free time on their hands. Poor conflict resolution also I think is another problem with that.
Bill Klaproth: Right. So the pandemic certainly made a lot of things that were already bad worse. There's no question about that. And the stresses and the strains of the pandemic. It's kind of easy to see why things that could have been resolved, normally escalated into, unfortunately, gun violence. So can you talk about the efforts happening at Le Bonheur in partnership with the community to try to curb this increase?
Sam Sheppard: Yes, there is a community walk against gun violence. It's a group of people here at Le Bonheur as well as throughout the community, Shelby County and Memphis, and they partner, they meet monthly and they plan for quarterly walks. And those walks are in the communities where they're seeing the highest amount of gun violence.
Bill Klaproth: Absolutely. And then, you know, data is so important in our everyday lives, so we can truly understand why things are happening. What pieces of data do you think are most important for the community to understand.
Sam Sheppard: Well, we looked at a lot of different data elements. One of those things is age. We look at age because a lot of times people think that this is just in the older age bracket that you see this, but we're seeing children under five years old that are being shot. So we like to look at age. We look at the injury type, like if it's an assault versus accidental. If it's accidental, like a child found a gun, the gun accidentally went off, or if it was an assault. And we also look at the location of the injury. That way, we can plan injury prevention. Whenever we find those different areas, we like to go out and teach the community about gun safety and things of that nature.
Bill Klaproth: Well, teaching and educating people about gun safety certainly can help in the prevention of firearm injury. So thank you for that, Sam. Anissa, as the Le Bonheur trauma program director, you work every day to make sure that your team is prepared to offer every life-saving measure possible when the call comes in regarding a gunshot victim. So let me ask you, how is Le Bonheur's team prepared to handle gunshot wound cases.
Anissa Revels: Absolutely. Thank you, Bill, for the question. Our physicians attend classes. They attend a class called advanced trauma life support, and it's designed to teach systematic and a concise approach to the care of trauma patients. In these courses, they listen to didactic training and then they perform hands-on training, that allows the student to apply what they've learned to actually practicing the skills that's needed to help to save a life.
Our nurses pretty much go through the same type of courses, where they receive teaching and hands-on training, except their training and teaching is on the level where nurses are given the skills that are allowed for them to actually take care of patients in the trauma setting. The nurses here most work at least a year in our ED before they attend those courses. And once they've worked a year, they will be assigned to the trauma nurse course, which like I say, provides them with knowledge and technique for the nurse to use in taking care of our trauma patients.
There are other courses that we encourage our nurses and physicians to attend, such as the ASSET course, which is for our surgeons. ASSET stands for Advanced Surgical Skills for Exposure in Trauma. And our nurses can take the ATCN course, which is our Advanced Trauma Care Nurse course. Also, we provide mock code scenarios to our team that's done periodically throughout the year and this observes their strengths and weaknesses during a trauma resuscitation.
So we may do a scenario for gunshot wounds, a case for motor vehicle crashes and respiratory distress, just a variety different things that we see that come through our doors on a daily basis. After we perform those mock codes, we do debrief with our teams to share with them what was done really good during the resuscitation and what areas that we need work on. That provides them that actual in-house training and practice for us to be able to take care of those gunshot wound cases that come through the doors.
Bill Klaproth: So Annisa, you've just described basically a lot of team members, a lot of things going on. So can you describe the different team members' roles?
Anissa Revels: I can. So we usually have about nine to ten personnels that are in the trauma bay rooms to receive a patient. That consists of the emergency room department physician, our trauma surgeons who both are considered our team leaders. So they will organize and provide instructions throughout the resuscitation. We have three trauma nurses that are in the room as well. One nurse does the documentation. So she's documenting and writing down everything that's going on in the room. The other two nurses, one is a medication nurse who provides all of the medications that the patient may need. And the second nurse is a procedure nurse. So any type of procedures that the physician is requesting, that nurse will take care of those duties.
We also have respiratory therapists and our CRNA or anesthesia who provides basically our airway support for the patient. There are two EDTs, which are emergency department technicians who will take care of placing the patient on monitors, removing their clothing and performing CPR if that's needed. We also have a pharmacist that's in the room that will provide all of the medications that are being requested by the physicians to give to the patient. So that's basically the team and what their roles are when taking care of those gunshot wound patients or any type of trauma patient that comes into our hospital.
Bill Klaproth: Well, it seems like timing seems to be a critical element of care in cases like these, especially when you're talking about all of these team members. There is an urgency. Can you talk about Le Bonheur's preparedness to take swift action?
Anissa Revels: Absolutely. We have three activation levels that have certain criteria that must be met for us to determine how to prepare our teams. Each activation level has a level of important or urgency to them. So once the hospital receives notification from our EMS partners or a referring hospital, based off of what those reports are to tell us what type of patient we get coming through the doors, we will then activate the correct activation level.
Once that level has been determined, the notification is sent out to our teams. We have assigned team members and departments who know to respond to our emergency department within a defined timeframe, depending on the activation level and the estimated time of arrival for that patient.
So depending on what that call coming in, let's us know how severe this patient is, we'll choose the correct activation level. And then once that notification is sent out, those team members know exactly how fast and how quick to get down to the emergency department. So we'll be ready and available to take care of that patient once they arrive through our doors.
Bill Klaproth: Annisa, thank you so much for that.
Bill Klaproth: This has been a fascinating topic and a much needed discussion. So, Anissa, Sam and Dr. Williams, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.
Dr. Regan Williams: Thank you.
Anissa Revels: Thank you so much, Bill.
Sam Sheppard: Thank you.
Bill Klaproth: And for more information on this subject, please visit lebonheur.org/podcasts. And be sure to subscribe to the Peds Pod on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out lebonheur.org/podcast to view the full podcast library. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels.
This is The Peds Pod by Le Bonheur Children's Hospital. Thanks for listening.