[deepandmeaning]

This story is incredible.

The standout's for me were:

* Plan - have a plan in place in advance * Flow - recognise and shift bottlenecks + understand the impact to the system * Prioritise - rank what is critical, urgent, or standard - and be ruthless * Process - simplify the processes to make it more effective and efficient * Shift - innovate and adapt in the face of changing circumstances.

These sound like no brainers, but reading the story you get a sense of how one individual pushing these forward in a tough situation had an incredibly powerful impact.

How could we apply these powerful lessons more widely?

[walshemj]

I am surprised from the article that all hospitals don't have plans in place for major incidents and its only his experience with the SWAT team that led him to devise the plan before time.

Also I know in the UK they do role-play major incidents out using the police and emergency services to test there plans.

BTW this guy and his team deserve an honour of some sort

[JshWright]

Hospitals absolutely have plans like this in place. He certainly leaned on his prior experiences to apply lessons learned previously (as we all do), but there was absolutely a plan in place outside of his personal experiences.

The trauma center in our region holds similar "mock incidents" at least once a year. Certainly nothing to this scale (there's just no way to practice that...), but they routinely run drills with dozens of patients and simulate various in-hospital system failures.