Medical drama hits home for ER chief shaped by Columbine and Aurora tragedies

Tiburon resident Christopher Colwell is the chief of the emergency-medicine department at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, a position he’s held since 2016. Prior to that, he spent nearly 20 years at Denver Health, including six years as emergency-medicine chief from 2010 to 2016. At Denver Health, he was on the scene during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting and led the response to the 2012 Aurora movie theater killings. He’s become a leader in discussing how to handle mass-casualty events from a medical standpoint, talking at conferences and to news outlets. (Francisco Martinez / The Ark)

For Christopher Colwell, watching an episode of “The Pitt” isn’t just entertainment — it’s a reflection of his reality. The medical drama streaming on Max takes place inside an overcrowded, underfunded emergency room, and it features real cases, he says, even if there’s some added theatrics.

“What ‘The Pitt’ does is the closest thing to what I do that I’ve ever seen,” says the 59-year-old Tiburon resident, who serves as chief of emergency medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

Colwell speaks from extensive experience. Before moving to the Bay Area in 2016, he served as emergency-medicine director at Denver Health hospital from 2010 to 2016, where he earlier worked as medical director for both the Denver Fire Department and Denver Health’s paramedic division.

It was during his Denver tenure that Colwell responded to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre that left 14 dead and the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie-theater shooting that killed 13. He was in San Francisco for the 2017 UPS-facility shooting where three died.

His expertise from these tragedies informs his work overseeing an emergency department that treats 76,000 patients a year and has shaped him into an authoritative voice on disaster management, mass-casualty events, COVID-19 responses and wildfire health impacts. He’s sought out to speak at medical conferences, as an expert voice in the press and even to review TV shows for medical accuracy, as he did for “The Pitt” in online magazine Slate in March.

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