For the past 20 years, Larissa University Hospital has been hosting a seminar for doctors and nurses on trauma and mass disasters twice a year. Doctors at the Larisa General Hospital also have experience with high-injury incidents, such as the bus accident with PAOK fans in 1999 and the accident with students of the 1st Lyceum from Imatija in 2003.

The two public hospitals of Larissa were put on high alert at midnight on February 28 to immediately receive victims of the Tempi train derailment, activating the contingency plan provided for these cases and their experiences. “I consider filotimo unnecessary. The world knows we have honor. The question is what happens from there. Because praise, if you can’t handle it, means nothing. Having 60 doctors in a 5 by 5 space doesn’t mean I’m also efficient. I am philanthropic, I am inefficient,” says Dimitris Zacharulis, professor of surgery and president of the surgical department at Larisa University Hospital.

At the time of the accident, the Larisa University Hospital was on duty. From 00.30 to 04.00 in the morning, he received 55 wounded from a passenger train, experiencing a situation resembling a “war”. “Screaming, blood, burns, a situation that could turn into chaos,” Mr. Zacharulis describes. He was informed about this by the management of the hospital as the head of the surgical department at about 12 o’clock at night. “I made a lot of noise. We didn’t know the scale of the incident, we only knew that there was a collision between two trains, not knowing that one of them was commercial,” he notes. He made the first phone calls to surgical clinics and front-line clinics – anesthesiology , orthopedics, neurosurgery, etc. The mandate was to have staff to meet “unspecified” needs.

A similar mobilization took place in the Larisa General Hospital, which, however, was not on duty. “At 12 pm I received a call from the director of the intensive care unit, Mr. Komnos, after he was informed of the incident and given the order to “open” the hospital. I went to the hospital and started to warn colleagues on the phone. There was also a huge turnout of workers even before they were officially notified, ”Konstantinos Karakoussis, director of the medical service of the Larissa Multidisciplinary Hospital, explains to K.

“Screaming, blood, burns, a situation that could turn into chaos…”

On the basis of the protocol, the personnel were divided into groups that carried out accounting – identification of patients, examination and treatment of wounds, according to specialties corresponding to the type of wounds. As Mr. Karakoussis points out, “one or two people replace the victim. No one wanders aimlessly back and forth. No talking, nothing else. At this time, only medical instructions and only if someone somewhere gets into trouble and asks for help from a colleague. And he adds, “Imagine we had a big turnout of staff and we had to drop fellow nurses and others because they were making things difficult at the time.”

Mr. Zacharulis notes that “as a surgical clinic, we received the bulk of cases. All the wounded were received, there was no one, we said that night: “You are leaving, you are going home.” There was a second brigade in the polyclinic, which checked what the first brigade had done, which took care of the wounded at the thermal power plants, that is, it “filtered” any omissions, because we are talking about the combat situation in the thermal power plants. The first visit of the patients to the clinic took place between 04:30 and 05:00. In retrospect, no preventable damage was carried out, not a single person died inside the hospital. As a manager, I give my doctors the best.”

The Larisin General Hospital accepted 34 wounded and all the bodies of the victims of the accident. “The first victims arrived at 00.30. At 02.30 the body bags began to arrive. Therefore, a place was set up to receive the bodies and register them before being sent to the mortuary. Numbering depending on the time of visit, male or female. The tragic picture was the parents who arrived between 01.00 and 02.00. They found out about the accident, their child’s phone was not answered, and they came to look. We opened the assembly hall of the hospital. Social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists were sent there, and people from the Red Cross also helped us. The relatives were taken care of, taken to the amphitheater, away from the “battlefield”. Don’t let them see what’s going on.”

In connection with the accident in Tempi, hospitals were put on high alert, Nikos Papaevstatiou, president of EKAV-KEPY, told K. Thessaloniki hospitals with burn departments were also notified because of the fire. It is extremely important to have reliable and reliable information about the incident. As soon as the first mobile ambulance arrived on the scene and the doctor assessed the situation, the alert level was raised and the hospitals were put on alert.