Congratulations to Dr. Amanda Stone, Dr. Amanda Tarkowski, Dr. Tory Weatherford, Dr. Christopher Ponder and Dr. Thomas Smith for winning the 2016 EMRA Clinical Excellence Award!

This award recognizes a resident who has done outstanding work in the clinical aspect of emergency medicine. This year it was awarded to the 5 Orlando Residents that were on shift during the Orlando Shootings, three of whom are fabulous FemInEMs!

All five of these physicians were senior residents on the overnight shift of June 12, 2016 and were on duty in the Orlando Health Emergency Department during the Pulse shooting mass casualty incident. With the utmost respect for the memories of the victims involved in a horrible and most unfortunate event, these five graduating seniors utilized their comprehensive skills when they were faced with an overwhelming number of critical patients over a short period of time. These residents were forced to improvise, adapt and overcome an extremely challenging event. Collectively, they rose to the occasion beautifully. In actuality, the volume, acuity and the rate of presenting critically injured patients was so high they didn’t have time to do much more than fall back on their training and do what was necessary to take care of all of these individuals. Many of the victims of this misfortune are alive today because of the actions of these residents. To state that they did a superb job is an understatement. Words cannot describe the effort, the emotional investment and the team work involved in what they did.

Congratulations Dr. Stone, St. Tarkowski, Dr. Weatherford, Dr. Ponder and Dr. Smith and thank you for your tremendous work!