An active shooter scenario played out at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre Wednesday and even though it wasn't real, participants found it chilling.
Barrie Police and RVH conducted a mock Code Silver, the new emergency code endorsed by the Ontario Hospital Association referring to a person with a weapon.
"Today was a very real feeling and I believe for everybody involved it's eerie to think that this could happen in any place let alone in Barrie," said Const. Keith Fines of the Barrie Police Tactical Support Unit. "The reality is that these incidents are occurring. We have to train for it."
The training exercise on the fourth floor of the hospital featured a masked gunman and six "victims" with realistic gunshot wounds and lots of fake blood.
It was the first Code Silver training exercise at RVH and included the boom of gunshots and a response from the police tactical unit along with tactical paramedics.
"We have had numerous lockdowns within the city over the past few years but this is very different," said Fines. "It's a very large building. There's a lot of different members here. Lots of different ages and abilities. It's a really different dynamic when you come into a hospital."
John Jennett, security technology coordinator at RVH, was part of the planning team and says it was an opportunity for all responders to work together and test their plans and procedures as one.
Hospital staff received instructions on how to react to a situation everyone hopes will never happen.
"What we're doing is we're empowering the staff with the knowledge to be able to act in this type of event. What we're teaching our staff is run, hide and as a last resort - fight."
The hospital trains for all kinds of emergency scenarios on an ongoing basis but seeing the fake gunman rattled staff.
"It really was frightening for people even though we knew it wasn't real," said Suzanne Legue, VP of Communications at RVH. "Most of us would think something like this, an active shooter in a hospital is unthinkable - and it has never happened here. However it has happened in other Ontario hospitals so we need to be very well prepared."
Tactical paramedics had the chance to train in a multiple casualty scenario and actually dressed the wounds of the fake patients.
"Our job is to triage and create a casualty collection point," said Adam Lewitsky, a Tactical Paramedic with County of Simcoe Paramedic Services. "With our training we can get to them in these situations and hopefully give them a chance to survive."
"It felt really real," Lewitsky said. "The wounds looked really real. The actors were really great. It felt like it was real time and had a real element of working under a threat."
Const. Nicole Rodgers watched the scenario unfold and said the integrated training went very well.
She too thought the exercise was very realistic, felt it in 'real time' like Lewitsky, and said it seemed like an eternity waiting for police even though it wasn't.
"Although it was only minutes until we were on scene even me standing here as an officer who has gone through the scenarios, kept looking at the clock going, when are they going to be here," said Rodgers. "It's amazing how it gives you those chills and makes you realize how in that situation time stops."
Participants will evaluate the exercise for what worked well and where response can be improved.
