Despite the rapid and overall successful response by the Baltimore City police department and the FBI, the shooting that took place last Thursday at the Johns Hopkins Hospital demonstrates vulnerabilities that plague not only Hopkins Hospital but medical centers across the nation.
On September 16th at approximately 11:11 a.m. the hospital alerted Baltimore City police that a visitor had shot and wounded a doctor due to dissatisfaction with the treatment and care that his mother, a patient at the hospital, had received.
After an approximately four hour standoff with police, the man shot his mother and then himself.
Anthony Guglielmi, the public affairs officer with the Baltimore City Police Department, identified the shooter as Paul Pardus, a 50 year old resident of Arlington Virginia. “He was a transportation worker driving around patients to healthcare facilities,” Guglielmi said.
“He had been on leave for quite a while to take care of his mother,” Guglielmi explained. “He was dissatisfied with the care and treatment and unfairly took it out on a doctor.”
According to Guglielmi, Pardus had a legal gun permit issued by Virginia but did not have the right to bring the weapon into the state of Maryland. Previous to the shooting, his only brushes with the law had been minor traffic offenses.
Guglielmi expressed satisfaction at the response of the Baltimore City police and FBI.
“It was like clockwork,” he said. “I would give the police an A. We practice for this kind of situation all the time, mass evacuations and such.”
“Hopkins is tremendously secure and the relationship with the Baltimore Police is unmatched,” he added. Guglielmi also pointed to the hospital’s overall organization as being extremely useful during the situation.
“For example, simply having the staff wearing id’s around their necks letting police know where they could and should be was helpful to containing the scene at the time,” he explained.
Guglielmi acknowledged, however, that the police department is critical of their response and always looking into improvements that could be made. Beth Simpkins, the News Media Services Coordinator for Johns Hopkins Medicine similarly agreed that the hospital has also been critically assessing its security in light of the recent event.
“We are reviewing our security protocols, as we would after any such major event, to determine if there is any opportunity to improve them,” Simpkins wrote in an email to the News-Letter.
“We train for these unfortunate events and have plans and protocols in place for virtually every disaster scenario you can envision: from Ebola fever outbreaks, to flooding, to a terrorist attack.”
“These plans — and our staff, especially security — responded exactly as they should have,” Simpkins wrote. The official statement issued by the hospital on Friday stated that at no time during the incident or its aftermath were any hospital operations compromised outside of the 8th floor of the Nelson building.
And within hours of the incident the hospital was again operating at full speed.
Recent Hopkins graduate Alisha Tuteja, who works in the department of neurology at the Hospital described the situation at the time of the shooting.
“All the buildings are interconnected by bridges and walkways,” she explained. “So we were separated from the main building . . . we were told to shut down the doors and keep away from windows because for a while no one knew where he ran.”
She added that “rumors were flying around.” The eighth floor, where Pardus was located, is also the level of the pregnancy and labor ward.
“He was also near the psych ward or something . . . we heard something about the psych ward, so nobody knew what was going on,” she said.
While Tuteja could not see the police operations from her location, she said that all the Hospital employees she talked to said the area was very secure.
“From what we were told security was really tight. They were really on top of it,” she said.
While the efficiency of the Baltimore Police and hospital in responding to the incidence has not been disputed, crisis management and threat assessment expert Larry Barton pointed out that hospitals need to constantly be on the watch for such occurrences and constantly hone their security protocols.
According to Barton hospitals are already locations of numerous violent incidents even without an outside perpetrator.
“Common threats in the medical profession would be worker on worker conflict,” Barton said. Anyone at any workplace with an opinion different from that of another worker could engage in a confrontation.
Barton also called emergency rooms volatile places where family stress can get out of control when husbands and wives blame each other for their child ending up in an emergency room. “Child abductions are always of great concern to pediatricians,” Barton said.
“Robberies are not surprising either. Hospitals are a source of tremendous opportunity for those of substance abuse issues, for those breaking into pharmacies,” he said.
In just this past year there have been seven medical centers that have experienced violent occurrences.
“About one month ago at the Park West Medical Center down in Knoxville there was a guy who shot and killed a woman and wounded two others,” Barton explained.
He acknowledged that it is too early to say there is a trend in hospital violence but Barton also noted that more and more facilities are asking for his help in training programs and threat assessment.
Barton speculated that the source of the increasing violence lies in declining economic conditions.
“We have eroding economies. For anyone at risk for mental or physical illness the fact that they have less money makes their life more miserable and second because of the eroding economy you have people who are unable to buy their medication so you have more people at risk walking the streets and walking the hospital ward,” Barton said.
He added that overall the number of people suffering from mental illness is increasing as the number of centers helping them has been reduced due to budget cuts.
For Hopkins Hospital, in particular, Barton recommended revisiting notification protocol. “Once they knew they had a problem they sent an email to the staff,” Barton said.
“Typically when you have a hostage situation, email doesn’t cut it. You need to be able to send a text or phone call,” he said.
He suggested Hopkins hospital implement a threat assessment team and think about how they could maximize technology.
“If something happened on a college campus you would receive a text message. We’ve learned from Virginia Tech, we’ve learned from Columbine. We need to expect that from our employers,” Barton said.
Barton also questioned whether or not Pardus had a known grievance with the medical care.
“If indeed the medical staff aware that this was an angry volatile visitor, who maybe had made demands or written letters, and they didn’t take any actions then I think Hopkins is going to have some serious liability,” he said.
While some of the exact details of the shooting as well as details regarding Hopkins Hospital’s security are still unknown, some good news has been secured. Simpkins informed The News-Letter in an email that the doctor shot during the incident is now in good condition.
