Two phones started ringing at between 2am and 3am on November 14, 2015. One belonged to Pauline Watine and the other to Maxime Riedinger—two of Orthofix’s territory managers who are based in Paris.
The phone calls came shortly after a pack of killers roamed Paris gunning down nearly 500 unsuspecting men, women and children at restaurants, concert halls and walking the boulevards of that beautiful, graceful city.
Both live in Paris and frequently receive phone calls from hospital staff members. But not like this.
On the phone in those early hours of November 14 was Bichat University Hospital. They needed ready-to-use sterile kits for elbow, pelvic and lower limb extremities immediately.
There had been shootings all over Paris and the wounded were streaming into the hospital. And the wounds were awful.
The Good Guys Take Over
Evil opened up the night but goodness took it back.
Pauline and Maxime work for Orthofix—which is well known for, among other products, its line of advanced external fixation devices. External fixators are used, typically, to stabilize severe open fractures—where “severe” refers to significant soft tissue disruption (e.g., type II or III open fractures). External fixation is a common method for treating gunshot wounds. As in war.
The story of how Orthofix’s team responded to the November Paris shooting tragedy came to OTW from Davide Bianchi, President of Extremity Fixation for Orthofix.
All that day and into the evening Davide’s team (Pauline Watine, Maxime Riedinger, Marion Delfosse and Richard Ausslin) scrambled to locate all the sterile kits they could and move them to Bichat Trauma center and then Lariboisiere, La Pitié, St. Antoine, St Louis and Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou (HEGP).
In an extraordinary 12 hour period, Paris trauma teams grappled with the highest number of gunshot wounds since the Second World War. Gunshot wounds are extremely rare in Paris. For most of the doctors this was the first time they’d ever seen such an oblong metal object in the X-ray. It was an AK47 bullet.
A war wound in Paris.
Shortly before Orthofix’s phones began ringing, Paris’s director of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP), a network of public hospitals in Paris, activated the city’s Plan Blanc, or White Plan, mobilizing all 40 hospitals to call in extra staff members and freeing up resources by emptying beds and canceling nonessential procedures.
Thirty-five operating theatres opened up across Paris.
And the Good Guys shifted into high gear.
Paris Is Our Home
“Paris is our home. We have an office and people there. So when it comes very close, it is very difficult to talk about.” Said Davide Bianchi as he recalled those intense hours after the calls came in. “So, I apologize for the pauses. It was Friday night and some of our team had left Paris for the weekend. They were, I’d say, a couple hundred miles away. It was 3 am. When the hospitals called, we all reacted. The hospitals need products. So we woke up our colleagues, customer service and those who were out of the city, simply turned the cars back to Paris. We do whatever we can to supply. Anyone in this situation would have done the same. I’m sure about that.”
It was strange moving through the streets of Paris in the hours after the attacks.
“Our sales and service reps called the nurses to give them the names of our people delivering products. Otherwise they would not have access to the hospitals secured by the Police. Sometimes the nurses came out to take away the goods when the access was not authorized for security reasons. First in mind was to provide the best service and solution to our customers, to help to save patient life and to be as reactive as we can.”
And Davide pauses. Even months later, his heart breaks at the tragedy.
“It happened where we live. It is so emotional. After everything. The nurses were in panic, crying, tired, and surgeons overwhelmed. Never saw anything like that.”
With that, he gathers himself and continues, remembering again those intense hours.
“The hospital called up and we were capable to react so quickly. Those hospitals realize that you do need external fixation. When it is a gun shooting, there are not many alternatives. Sadly, they now realize that they need to have stock on hand. Those kinds of shootings can happen again, unfortunately.”
Paris, Haiti, Chengdu, New Orleans
In the aftermath of Katrina many companies donated people, instruments even their corporate planes to help. Literally as after-shocks were hitting Haiti, groups of orthopedic surgeons and company reps were packing their bags to go to Port Au Prince to go to work. After the massive earthquakes in Chengdu, hundreds of orthopedists as supported by companies and hospitals streamed into the devastation to help.
This is orthopedics. This is who we are and what we do.
And in Paris, there were no second thoughts. Just action.
“The biggest thing is that we demonstrated to ourselves that we are partners with our hospitals and the patients we all serve together.” Recalls Bianchi.
Lessons Learned
Service, reactivity, and proactivity, says Bianchi, are the key in cases of extreme emergency like this. Most hospitals and support personnel like his teams are not well prepared to face this type of sudden and unexpected event, both in terms of material inventory/availability and surgical patient management (massive flow of patients to take care in emergency). So, in Bianchi’s view, support staff must be flexible and adaptable.
“We want and we must be prepared should this happen again. Training/education is key and we have a duty and a responsibility to help with HCP education. Hospitals alone do not have the capability to do it all themselves. We need to create an awareness of DCO (Damage Control Orthopedic) philosophy. Until now, DCO was mainly known and practiced by the military in “war surgery” situations. Finally, but not least, I’m so proud of everyone at Orthofix.”
By the end of the week, Bianchi’s team had supplied products and other support for the doctors and nurses treating 45 of the victims.
Doing their job.
