A police officer was killed Saturday after responding to a shooting at a central Pennsylvania hospital, officials said.

The officer slain in the shooting at UPMC memorial hospital in York was identified as Andrew Duarte of the West York borough police department. He had been responding to a mutual aid call, the department posted on its Facebook page.

“We all have broken hearts and are grieving at his loss,” said the West York borough manager Shawn Mauck.

A gunman also died, officials said. Officials at UPMC memorial said that no patients had been injured.

Law enforcement were on the premises and managing the situation, Susan Manko, vice-president of public relations for UPMC, said in an emailed statement.

Duarte was a six-year law enforcement veteran who joined the West York borough police department in 2022 after five years with the Denver police department in Colorado, according to Duarte’s LinkedIn profile.

In a statement on its website, the hospital asked employees who had not been scheduled to work Saturday to stay home.

Families of patients arriving on site should report to the parking lot of the OSS building across the street from the hospital, Manko said.

The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, said in a social media post he was on the way to the hospital after being briefed on the shooting. He said the hospital was “secure”.

UPMC Memorial is a five-story, 104-bed hospital that opened in 2019 in York, a city of about 40,000 people known for its creation of York Peppermint Patties in 1940.

The shooting is part of a wave of gun violence in recent years that has swept through US hospitals and medical centers, which have struggled to adapt to the growing threats. Such attacks have helped make healthcare one of the nation’s most violent fields, with workers suffering more non-fatal injuries from workplace violence than workers in any other profession, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2023, a shooter killed a security guard in the lobby of New Hampshire’s state psychiatric hospital before being fatally shot by a state trooper. And an Oregon hospital security guard was shot to death while protecting a maternity ward from an attacker.

In 2022, a man killed two workers at a Dallas hospital while there to watch his child’s birth. In May of that year, a man opened fire in a medical center waiting room in Atlanta, killing one woman and wounding four. Just one month later, a gunman killed his surgeon and three other people at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, medical office because he blamed the doctor for his continuing pain after an operation.

Duarte was one of at least three police officers in the US who had been killed on duty since Friday.

Two Virginia Beach, Virginia, police department officers were reportedly shot and killed Friday night during a traffic stop. That department issued a statement on social media saying it was investigating the officers’ killings while grieving “the loss of two of [their] own”.