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Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago was forced to temporarily close its doors to new patients over the weekend after shootings and accidents throughout the Illinois city overwhelmed emergency medical officials.
The hospital, located on the city's west side, went on bypass at 4:30 a.m. Sunday and were off bypass status by 6:30 a.m., Roberta Rakove, senior vice president of external affairs, told Fox News on Monday.
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"Bypass" is a term used for when a hospital asks that emergency vehicles, like ambulances, pass their facility and bring patients to other locations.
Ravoka cited multiple incidents — including a shooting at Douglas Park and two motor vehicle accidents — as the catalyst for temporarily closing off the hospital to new patients.
As previously reported by Fox News, seven people were shot in Douglas Park after someone opened fire near a playground around 1:20 a.m. Rakove said Mount Sinai received five patients from that shooting, in which those shot ranged in age from 19 to 25.
"As a result of all of those patients from a capacity standpoint we made a decision to go on bypass for a period of time," the spokesperson said.
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Rakove said that Chicago has five Level 1 trauma centers with another located just outside of the city. She said that all of these centers "on occasion have capacity issues related to numbers of trauma patients at which time the trauma center at capacity will go on bypass and EMS will direct ambulances to one or more of the other trauma centers."
As of Monday morning, seven people had been killed and 46 others injured during weekend shootings in Chicago, according to the Sun-Times.
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