Joseph firefighters enter prior to a training drill Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024, at the Wallowa Memorial Hospital Clinic in Joseph.

WALLOWA COUNTY — Emergency responders attended to a dozen or so victims of a mass shooting Saturday, Jan. 20, at the Wallowa Memorial Hospital’s Joseph Clinic.

Don’t panic.

The “victims” consisted of traffic cones with notes taped on them stating their conditions so emergency personnel could triage them — determine who needed the most immediate treatment before getting them into an ambulance and off to the hospital.

In addition to the victims, the drill involved two dozen or so real people: ambulance attendants; clinic and hospital staff; Joseph Fire Department personnel; and law enforcement officers from Oregon State Police, the Wallowa County Sheriff’s Office and the Enterprise Police Department.

The event was part of a drill for emergency responders to test their training on how they would handle an active shooter situation.

“The simulation will be multiple victims,” said Brooke Pace, the hospitals’ director of communications and experience, before the afternoon event got underway.

There’s a reason why the training took place at the clinic: The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that, in 2022, more than three-quarters of all workplace violence incidents — 76% — occurred at some sort of health care facility. That’s up from around 60% in previous years.

Pace said she understands why medical facilities such as hospitals — locations where life-and-death dramas routinely play out — can be flashpoints for violence.

“People think of hospitals as places to come in and get well,” she said in a recent interview. “And obviously, along with that comes a lot of emotion, and anger, and grief and frustration, that inevitably can lead to violent activities.”

“The majority of that violence happens to nurses, with people who are actually in the room, the frontline people who are caring for patients,” Pace said. “That lays the backstory of why we take security so important and make it such an important topic here. Because above anything else, we want to make sure that our patients and our staff are receiving care in a safe facility.”

Saturday’s drill was to deal with a shooter who came into the clinic and, for unknown reasons, started shooting patients and staff there before ending his own life. Part of the police effort was to ensure there wasn’t a second shooter.

That’s why they do a lockdown as part of the drill — making sure no one can enter or leave until police determine it’s safe to do so.

“We use an alert system to alert staff if we need a lockdown to get all hands on deck,” Pace said.

She said Saturday that, to her knowledge, there has never been a real active shooter incident with multiple victims in Wallowa County.

But, she added, there have been incidents in which multiple people have been injured, and triage — determining which victims are most critical and where they should go — is an important skill in those situations.

So, in Saturday’s drill, “victims” were brought to the clinic lobby and assessed for their wounds before being either giving initial, lifesaving treatment or simply taken to a waiting ambulance. From there, they were taken to the emergency room at the hospital in Enterprise.

The drill, she said, was “also about getting the most people in through the emergency room door.”

Part of that is making sure the triage process assesses victims properly. Pace cited an after-action review of one incident (not in Wallowa County) that showed that ambulances were transporting deceased patients and some of the wounded were transported on a school bus when it should’ve been the other way around.

Saturday’s drill, Pace said, was one of a number of different training events the hospital and its clinics do throughout the year. The hospital also routinely does tabletop exercises in which participants react to scenarios such as a hazardous-materials spill resulting in numerous casualties — and even, once a year or so, trains for a possible case in which an infant is taken from the hospital’s maternity ward. That, she said, never has happened at Wallowa Memorial Hospital — but it’s always better to be prepared.