{"id":272783,"date":"2026-05-15T21:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T21:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/272783\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T21:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T21:31:08","slug":"10-years-later-pulse-changed-trauma-care-far-beyond-orlando-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/272783\/","title":{"rendered":"10 years later, Pulse changed trauma care far beyond Orlando"},"content":{"rendered":"

ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 \u201cIt\u2019s not a question of if another event like this is going to occur. It\u2019s just a question of when.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ten years after the Pulse nightclub shooting, doctors at Orlando Health say the lessons learned that night continue to shape how hospitals across the country prepare for mass casualty events.<\/p>\n

IHI 28th Annual National Forum Keynote: Insights and Stories from Orlando Health\u200b (Institute for Healthcare Improvement)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve given something like 600 different talks<\/a> around the world trying to pass those lessons on,\u201d said Dr. Michael Cheatham.<\/p>\n

The chaos began in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cI picked up the phone and he said I have 20 gunshot wounds, I need you now,\u201d Cheatham recalled.<\/p>\n

Orlando Regional Medical Center on June 12, 2016. (Copyright 2026 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.)<\/p>\n

Within minutes, victims from Pulse nightclub were flooding into Orlando Regional Medical Center. Doctors say a trauma room built for five or six people suddenly held 12 patients.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeds oriented in different ways\u2026 we had to kind of get creative to get all of them in the trauma room because that\u2019s where most of our resources are for the most critically injured patients,\u201d said Dr. Joseph Ibrahim.<\/p>\n

Eight years after Pulse, Orlando Health unveiled its newly expanded Level One Trauma Center<\/a>, more than doubling the size of the trauma bay and adding 10 more treatment areas for future mass casualty situations.<\/p>\n

Doctors say one reason the hospital response moved so quickly that night was because they had unknowingly rehearsed for a similar tragedy just three months earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scenario that year that occurred in March three months before Pulse was actually a mass shooter on the UCF campus,\u201d Cheatham said.<\/p>\n

Orlando Health mass casualty drill in March 2016 simulating a mass shooting on the UCF campus (Orlando Health)<\/p>\n

That disaster drill sent hundreds of mock victims to hospitals across Central Florida.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had already kind of practiced, if you will. We had already drilled for a mass casualty shooting event. And I have no doubt in my mind that that saved lives,\u201d Cheatham said.<\/p>\n

But doctors say Pulse exposed challenges no training exercise had fully prepared them for.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost disaster drills focus on how to take care of patients. In our situation we had over 500 family members that were sitting outside of the hospital because the hospital were on lockdown,\u201d Cheatham said.<\/p>\n

Friends and family members waiting outside of ORMC on June 12, 2016. (Copyright 2026 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to support those 500 people, we had to provide them with water so they wouldn\u2019t pass out, we had to provide them with phone chargers, we had to try and provide them with information.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody ever talks about families. Nobody talks about how to take care of all the donations from the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doctors say one of the most lasting lessons involved the emotional toll on the people who responded that night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t really hit me for another month,\u201d Ibrahim said.<\/p>\n

Hospital leaders say Pulse changed how medical systems support first responders, doctors, nurses and staff after traumatic events.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe counseled fifteen hundred team members in the next ten days,\u201d Cheatham said.<\/p>\n

Today, hospitals around the world study the Pulse response as part of disaster preparedness training, with the hope the lessons learned in Orlando may one day help save lives somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 \u201cIt\u2019s not a question of if another event like this is going to occur. It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[571,116671,116672,1335,139,141,6031,140,8309,71767],"class_list":["post-272783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-health","tag-lessons-learned","tag-mass-casualty-drill","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-health","tag-orlando-news","tag-pulse-nightclub","tag-trauma-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}