A doctor has described the harrowing scenes that unfolded in the emergency department of a Sydney hospital, including how victims had to be resuscitated repeatedly after the horrific Westfield Bondi Junction attack.
Trauma surgeon Dr Anthony Chambers was on duty at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, about 10 minutes from the scene of the attack, and was completing an appendix operation around 4pm on Saturday when chaos erupted.
“My phone, our surgical registrar’s phone, the anesthetist’s phone, our trauma alert went off and I knew something really bad had happened,” Dr Chambers said at 7:30 a.m. ABC.
Saint-Vincent Hospital was expected to expect five patients, all in critical condition, as the situation evolved.
It was just one of six Sydney hospitals that would treat the 18 victims stabbed by the lone knifeman in the busy shopping centre, six of whom tragically died.
Dr Anthony Chambers was the trauma surgeon on duty at St Vincent’s Hospital on Saturday.
Eighteen people were stabbed by a single knifeman at Westfield Bondi Junction in an attack that left Sydney in shock (pictured: Paramedics at the scene)
“By the time I got to the emergency department, we had already received our first patient,” Dr. Chambers said.
“So the team was actively resuscitating this patient and I went straight to help him.”
Part of his job as senior surgeon on duty is to assess patients, coordinate treatment, and assign the hospital’s limited staff and life-saving equipment as needed – a task made more difficult by the fact of not knowing what injuries the next patients to arrive might have.
“We just worked methodically doing the initial resuscitation of these patients, moving them to our CT scanner to do a full body scan to get a better appreciation of the injuries and resuscitating them (again),” said Dr. Chambers.
One of the most urgent tasks in stabilizing patients, he said, is replacing lost blood to prevent organ failure.
“Then we moved them to our operating room and intensive care unit so they could have definitive surgery to stop the bleeding from their stab wounds,” Dr. Chambers said.
As doctors, nurses, surgeons and anesthesiologists feverishly tended to patients, social worker Scarlett Sevastopoulos was among the staff helping the frantic family members who had rushed to the hospital.
St. Vincent was one of six hospitals receiving patients following Saturday’s attack.
Scarlett Sebastopoulos told ABC it was a privilege to help families as a hospital social worker.
Many were unsure of their loved one’s injuries or even if they were in the correct hospital where their family member had been transferred.
Ms. Sevestopoulos said her main goal was to calm confused relatives by taking them to a quieter part of the hospital and potentially stopping them from searching their phones for information online that might be distressing or inaccurate.
She described the work she does to help families through such heartbreaking events as a “privilege.”
Eight hours after the first patient arrived, the situation was sufficiently under control for staff to take a breather and get their bearings.
Hundreds of people are expected to gather at Westfield Bondi Junction in the eastern suburbs on Thursday to pay their respects to those affected by Saturday’s attack, with black ribbons unfurled inside the centre.
The reopening will mark nearly a week since six people were killed when Joel Cauchi, 40, went on a stabbing attack.
Bondi Junction’s Oxford Street Shopping Center has become a sea of tributes paying tribute to the victims of the Westfield stabbing attack.
The Queensland man, whose family had lived with mental illness for decades, was shot dead by a police inspector on level five of the complex.
Six people remain in Sydney hospitals, including a woman in intensive care in a serious but stable condition, NSW Health said on Wednesday.
A nine-month-old baby, whose mother was one of the five women killed in the attack, is hospitalized in serious but stable condition.
A permanent memorial is planned near the site, and a beachside candlelight vigil will also take place on Sunday.
Ashlee Good, 38, advertising heiress Dawn Singleton, 25, architect Jade Young, 47, artist Pikria Darchia, 55, and security guard Faraz Tahir, 30, and Yixuan Cheng, 27, lost his life in the attack.
Bondi Junction was teeming with police and paramedics on Saturday (photo)
Cauchi (pictured) stabbed six people to death at Westfield Bondi Junction shortly before 4pm on Saturday.
NSW Premier Chris Minns and Police Commissioner Karen Webb at a memorial to the victims at Bondi Junction on Thursday.
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