Archbold is stress-testing its emergency response with a live active shooter drill.
Full-scale drill happening Wednesday, focused on emergency department and same-day surgery Over 60 nursing students from Southern Regional Technical College will play victims and family members First responders from local police, fire, EMS, and 911 will join hospital staff in the simulation.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
From nurses to security to local police, it takes a full team to respond to an emergency inside a hospital.
I’m taking a closer look at the people behind a Code Silver drill being held Wednesday, and how they’re preparing for a crisis before it happens.
“So, annually, I come up with and develop what we’re going to exercise across all four of our hospitals and four of our long-term care facilities. And this year, I looked at workplace violence as a whole, and then drew the conclusion that it’s been a while since we’ve exercised an active shooter in the hospital,” said Winchester.
Chuck Winchester, Archbold’s emergency management coordinator, tells me this is the first active shooter drill at Archbold in nearly four years.
While Thomasville hasn’t experienced any mass casualty events, hospitals across Georgia are seeing rising threats.
Those include a lockdown at Grady Memorial gunfire near the ER and a mass shooting at Atlanta’s Northside Midtown in 2023.
Nationwide, the numbers are climbing fast:
The FBI reports 223 active shooter incidents between 2020 and 2024a 70% jump from the previous five years.
That’s why Archbold isn’t waiting for a tragedy. They’re testing every part of their response now.
“Yeah, so every one of our officers has an ID badge that’s been given to them through Archbold Hospital, so they have access and accessibility to all these injuries and all these buildings. And so, depending on what facility, they can go in and they can address the threat,” said Chief Wade Glover from the Thomasville police deparment.
Thomasville Police officers have already been walking the halls, learning the layout, so they know exactly where to go when the call comes in.
“So we’ll actually have officers responding to take out the so-called shooter. We’ve got officers playing the role as a shooter. We’ve got investigators to come in and investigate the crime scenes. And then we have executive command staff to be on site for what they call the unified command,” said Glover.
The drill also activates Archbold’s Joint Information Center, or JIC set up across town at the Board of Education.
It’s where families would go in a real emergency to reunite and get official updates.
“We want staff and visitors and patients to avoid and then barricade if they can in the areas that they are and lastly, fight. And so that’s what is to be expected tomorrow of our staff. Other than that, business as normal. We’re not going to stop any procedures or any outpatients or any x-rays or anything like that,” said Winchester.
The drill starts around 9 a.m. Wednesday and lasts about two hours, mainly in the ER and same-day surgery.
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