Scores of doctors, nurses and ambulance crews sprang into action to help the injured immediately after the attacker struck in Westminster at about 2.40pm.
St Thomas’ hospital, just south of where pedestrians were rammed on Westminster Bridge, played a vital role initially, with staff rushing to administer urgent medical assistance to casualties.
Dr Colleen Anderson, a junior doctor from the hospital known widely as “Tommy’s”, was among staff who sprinted to the scene. She said she saw victims strewn across the bridge. “There were some with minor injuries, some catastrophic. Some had injuries they could walk away from, others had life-changing injuries.”
Anderson confirmed that a female pedestrian had died. “I confirmed one fatality. A woman. She was under the wheel of a bus. She died, confirmed her death at the scene,” she said. She also treated a police officer in his 30s with a head injury.
But soon four more London hospitals were involved, including three of the capital’s four major trauma centres: King’s College, the Royal London and St Mary’s hospitals, each a few miles away in south, east and west London respectively.
Pauline Cranmer, the London Ambulance Service’s deputy director of operations, said: “We treated 12 patients for serious injuries, who were all taken to hospital. Eight further patients were treated for less serious injuries at the scene. Sadly, three people also died at the scene.”
The first ambulance arrived on the scene within six minutes, inside the eight-minute target response time for the most immediately life-threatening 999 calls.
“We sent a number of resources to the scene including ambulance crews, London’s Air Ambulance and specialist teams trained to respond to this type of incident,” Cranmer added.
Eight of the injured were taken to the emergency department at King’s College hospital – six men and two women – two of whom it said were in a critical condition, with the other six described as stable.
St Thomas’ admitted two patients for treatment, a man and a woman, whom it said were “in a stable condition”.
NHS chiefs in the capital immediately set up an incident centre at a central London location to co-ordinate the health service’s large-scale response. Officials worked to ensure that all the NHS organisations involved had enough resources to deal with the attack and that the most seriously injured went to the hospitals best equipped to help them.
One official involved in the response said: “This was a serious incident and it’s incredibly sad what’s happened. But this sort of incident is what the NHS is ready for, especially in London. It’s one of the best places in the world for providing a quick, organised emergency response to a terrorist incident.
“People talk all the time about the NHS being under pressure, which it is. But when this sort of thing happens, you can’t beat the NHS.”
The LAS scrambled its helicopter ambulance to Westminster. However, the pressure on ambulance services caused by the incident led it to ask Londoners only to dial 999 for an ambulance “in a genuine emergency”.
