Realistic Hospital Hostage Drill Terrifies Patients, Nurses

Five men wearing ski masks and carrying guns burst into a hospital emergency room. They demanded morphine, forced nurses into a back room and left patients terrified.

The mother of a 6-year-old boy suffering an asthma attack was told to wait outside because a security guard had been taken hostage. A nurse said a respirator would be brought to her car.

“I was afraid to stay. I thought he could hurt me or my son if he came outside,” Karen Whorley said.

She had nothing to fear: The whole thing was a drill.

Now an emergency room doctor, the police chief and a lawyer hired by three nurses are denouncing as unnecessarily dangerous the Jan. 25 predawn exercise at Memorial Hospital in this city of 16,000 along the state’s southern border.

“This is the most flagrant travesty of justice, of care, of human concern that I have ever witnessed in a hospital setting,” Dr. Philip Levin wrote to hospital administrators.

Levin was not working when the early morning drill took place, but he complained that having the intruders use real guns--even if they were not loaded--was inappropriate and dangerous.

Memorial Hospital Director Joseph Roach said without elaborating that the five-minute drill taught the hospital that “our system was flawed.”

“We also learned that some people thought it was too lifelike and too real and we need to adjust that,” Roach said.

The potential for danger was the reason that Police Chief Dave Edwards spurned a request from hospital security officials to participate in the drill.

“People can carry concealed weapons now, and my concern was that anybody could walk in and not know it was staged,” Edwards said.

In 1993, a police officer saw an armed man holding a nurse hostage at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk. He radioed for backup, only to be told that it was a drill. No one was injured.

No one was hurt in the Memorial drill, but an elderly patient was so shocked by the gunmen that his pulse went “sky-high,” Levin said.

The standard procedure for such drills is to notify staff and patients and use obviously fake weapons, he said.

The physician on duty, the nursing supervisor and the armed security guards were told about the drill and had the authority to stop it at any time, hospital officials said.

But five nurses were not told, and three have hired an attorney, although no legal action has been taken.

Jim Shortt, the attorney, said one intruder pointed a gun at nurse Susan Martin and demanded morphine and other drugs from a medicine cabinet, and she complied.

Two other nurses were forced into a back room and another hid in a closet, according to Levin’s memo. “The nurses have apparently suffered significant psychological upset,” Levin wrote.

None of the five nurses agreed to talk to a reporter.

Dr. Gail Anderson, director of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said, “This might have been a very noble intention, but the planning was bad.”

After leaving the hospital, Whorley drove home with her son Zackery, who was barely able to breathe, and called an emergency dispatcher.

It was then that she learned it had all been a drill. An ambulance arrived and took her son back to the hospital.

“The nurses were still shaking,” Whorley said.