Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
When a Code Orange is called at Stanton Territorial Hospital, the entire facility is on high alert.

Dr. David Pontin, left, was on the scene of the Arctic Sunwest plane crash Sept. 22, while his colleague Dr. Dwayne Coad, right, was in the hospital acting as the trauma team leader. - Nicole Veerman/NNSL photo

Code Orange is the highest level of response. It's called by the hospital's chief executive officer in the event of a mass casualty situation.

The latest Code Orange was called Sept. 22 when the hospital received word of the Arctic Sunwest Twin Otter that crashed on Old Town next to the Aurora Geosciences building. There were nine people on board the plane, two of whom died on the scene, despite attempts to resuscitate them by ordinary Yellowknifers who arrived first on the scene.

Dr. Dwayne Coad was the ER physician on duty that afternoon, which put him in the position of trauma team leader, meaning he didn't deal with any one patient, but rather oversaw all of the doctors in the emergency ward. He said when a Code Orange is called, everyone from lab technicians to clerks are informed.

"Everybody is aware and they get into a whole different mode," he said.

"Everything stops, it's all geared to clearing out the emergency room.

"For instance, we may have patients in the emergency room ready to go to a floor, but they're awaiting a bed, all of that is accelerated."

While that's going on, administration alerts medical travel, so medevacs are on standby for patients that need to be transported to Edmonton.

"Then all available medical personnel are called and alerted and then the resources are allocated to the emerg physician to start to designate roles to the physicians.

"The triage nurse then takes the nurses, who all come down, and allocates those resources accordingly. Then the ER physician and the triage nurse start to look at what we have and where we're going to put people and how we're going to make assignments."

On the afternoon of Sept. 22, all of that planning and preparation was put into place before the first ambulance with plane crash victims on it arrived, about 30 minutes after the Code Orange was called.

The speed of the hospital's response was facilitated by the fact that one of its own was on the scene before the emergency vehicles had even arrived.

Dr. David Pontin, an ER physician at Stanton Territorial Hospital, was at his home on Ragged Ass Road when he received a call from a friend, asking for help. Pontin was out the door in seconds and found himself on McDonald Drive, among ordinary Yellowknifers who were pulling crash victims out of the Twin Otter floatplane.

Pontin's presence on the scene gave the hospital a leg up because he was able to inform the emergency department how many were on board and what injuries they had before they were even in an ambulance.

"In a way, I could kind of be an early warning system, or the eyes and ears of for the emergency department down at the scene," said Pontin.

"They had a good warning of what I suspected the injuries were and what kind of care the patients would need, so they were prepared for them when they came to the emergency department. They kind of had a heads up about what was happening."

Every time an ambulance left the scene, Pontin made a call, giving the emergency staff time to prepare for the patient on the way.

"We had about a four minute notice of who's coming next, which gave us lots of time to reshuffle beds and do what we needed to do to make sure that person would get the best team on them and the best place in the emerg," said Coad.

After all of the victims had been sent to the hospital, Pontin followed and immediately got to work as a team lead, overseeing one of the seven patients. For confidentiality reasons, he said he couldn't identify the patient or their injuries.

Of the seven, one was medevaced to Edmonton the same afternoon. The six others remained in Yellowknife at Stanton Territorial Hospital.

Pontin and Coad said the medical response that day was absolutely incredible.

"Nobody at any time, whether it was down on the scene or in the hospital, nobody panicked," said Pontin. "Everybody was focused and professional and patient care, I think, was really fantastic in the result.

"The thing that really astounds me is when I walked through that emergency department at 5:30 (p.m.), so just over four hours after this event, the emergency department was quiet again. There were beds open and we were back to business as usual, which is incredible, that everybody could be worked up, treated, sent to operating rooms, sent to Edmonton and sent to the wards, to the point where the emergency department was ready to go again," he said.

"The response was so phenomenal."

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.