Emergency Medicine

If we had to have this type of accident, I'm glad it happened where it did. Without Grady, I'm sure the human toll would have been even greater.

- James Harder
President, Bluffton University

In March 2007, a charter bus carrying an Ohio college baseball team crashed over an overpass, sailing into the air, plunging onto the interstate below. When Emory emergency medicine physician Eric Ossmann rushed to the scene to triage the injured, he found passengers who had been ejected when the bus hit the overpass barrier, others who were thrown when the bus landed on the highway below, others wounded inside the crumpled vehicle. Four young athletes and the bus driver and his wife were dead, another student dying. Nineteen others were seriously injured.

At Grady, the emergency medicine and trauma units ramped up, with attending physicians, residents, and nursing staff returning to work or ignoring the end of shifts. The ER was already full with a typical load of victims of car wrecks, gunshot wounds, and heart attacks, so the medical team turned a radiology waiting room into a place where the group from Bluffton University could stay together, supporting each other as clinicians examined and began treating each of the injured.

Over the next frenzied hours, students and clinicians began to bond, each group impressed by the comportment and compassion of the other. Weeks later, when the Bluffton baseball team returned to the field, Dr. Jeffrey Salomone, the trauma surgeon who treated 17 of the 19 injured patients, traveled 900 miles to attend their first game. "They touched our hearts," he explained. And soon thereafter, Bluffton University president James Harder traveled to Atlanta to thank Grady's physicians, nurses, EMS, and other clinicians for the care and kindness they had shown the students and their families.

"If we had to have this type of accident," he said, "I'm glad it happened where it did. Without Grady, I'm sure the human toll would have been even greater."

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Emergency Medicine