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States of Preparedness

(New Jersey Jewish News) Marilyn Silverstein - The X-ray filling the screen in the conference room at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., showed black shrapnel from a shattered watch lodged in the throat of a 19-year-old Israeli girl - a lesson in the anatomy of terror. "This young woman was on a bus on her way to college at 7:30 in the morning. There was a bomber aboard," said Dr. Charles Weissman, director of the department of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. "The bomb went off, and this is what we found in her neck - a Calvin Klein watch." Saving the young woman required a critical care team of vascular surgeons and throat specialists, Weissman told the 60 health and safety professionals. "But don't worry - she's going for her master's now." Weissman's lecture also covered organizational challenges in responding to terror events: How do you get physicians to the hospital when all the roads are blocked? What about the surgeons who rush to the hospital but can't find a parking space? How do you get ambulances in and out when a decoy ambulance may be rigged with a bomb? How do you integrate the casualties into a hospital already filled with emergency cases and ongoing surgeries? How should you organize your command center?
2006-05-12 00:00:00
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