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Code Silver is, to a certain extent, a sign of the times, with a steady increase in gun violence across the country.

“What happened in Kingston is very sobering,” said Dr. Andrew Willmore, medical director of emergency management at The Ottawa Hospital. “We like to think of hospitals as safe places. When something like this happens and you have significant violence in that special place, it certainly is jarring to the medical community and the public at large.”

Willmore is currently working on modules to train employees at The Ottawa Hospital on what to do in the event of a Code Silver.

Hospital shootings remain rare in Canada, although that is not the case in the United States. Between 2010 and 2011, there were 154 hospital-based shootings in the U.S., according to one study. Numbers have most likely increased since then.

On Monday, while Kingston General was dealing with Code Silver, a police officer, a doctor and a pharmacy resident were all shot at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital.

“This is a rather rare event, but not so rare that we can’t pay attention to it,” said Willmore. In fact, he noted, there has been a steady rise in gun violence in Canada — especially in Ontario — in recent years.

“Every year they say it is the worst year. The next year it happens again.”

Kingston is not the first Canadian hospital to be shattered by gunfire. In Cobourg a man shot his wife and then was shot by police at the local hospital in 2017. There have been several other shootings in hospitals across the province in recent years, including in Fort Erie and Northumberland.