thedrifter
04-25-09, 07:43 AM
Medics hone skills for war zones in Fort Story training
It's not Iraq or Afghanistan, but a wooded area at Fort Story in Virginia Beach served as a stand-in war zone this week for a group of Navy medical personnel preparing to deploy.
A group of 23 students - mostly corpsmen, the highly trained medics who accompany Marines into battle or work at combat hospitals - finished the three-day Tactical Combat Casualty Care course Friday with an outdoor training exercise that included running uphill in Kevlar vests while toting their rifles; dragging a 200-pound injured Marine to safety through soft sand; low-crawling through an obstacle course while gunshots rang out above them; and diagnosing and treating injured patients.
Cmdr. Thomas Craig, an emergency department doctor at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center and co-founder of the course, said the surroundings at Fort Story simulate situations corpsmen are likely to face overseas.
"Even though it's not urban assault in the alleys, we're still training to be in an austere environment, and kind of shifting toward what Afghanistan might be like," Craig said.
Lt. Shelly Maurer, a nurse who served in Afghanistan, runs the course. This week, five visitors from various Navy medical bureaucracies watched what unfolded at Fort Story. If all goes well, the course will be accredited as the East Coast hub for this pre-deployment medical training.
Maurer said the schedule already calls for 11 classes annually, with up to 40 students in a class. The frequency could double to twice a month, given the existing demand. The course is now mandatory for all enlisted medical personnel before they deploy overseas - and for all corpsmen every two years.
"This thing has taken on a life of its own," Maurer said.
Now the director of graduate medical education at Portsmouth, Craig developed his own version of the training after returning in 2005 from a seven-month deployment to a busy military trauma unit in Iraq.
He realized that medics and doctors alike needed better preparation for the vagaries of combat trauma. High-tech gadgets and supplies are worthless when you can't control the bleeding of a wounded Marine - or take care of your own injury. That's why one of the drills requires students to put tourniquets on themselves - then dictates they do it again, using their non dominant hand to apply a tourniquet to their dominant arm.
"If your dominant arm is shot, and you're bumbling and you've never done that before, how do you do it, watching your life bubble out of your arm?" Craig asked.
Maurer and Craig have worked together to align the course with standards at the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the National Operational Medicine Institute and the Naval Expeditionary Medical Training Institute.
A similar course is taught at Camp Pendleton, a California Marine Corps base.
Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com
Ellie
It's not Iraq or Afghanistan, but a wooded area at Fort Story in Virginia Beach served as a stand-in war zone this week for a group of Navy medical personnel preparing to deploy.
A group of 23 students - mostly corpsmen, the highly trained medics who accompany Marines into battle or work at combat hospitals - finished the three-day Tactical Combat Casualty Care course Friday with an outdoor training exercise that included running uphill in Kevlar vests while toting their rifles; dragging a 200-pound injured Marine to safety through soft sand; low-crawling through an obstacle course while gunshots rang out above them; and diagnosing and treating injured patients.
Cmdr. Thomas Craig, an emergency department doctor at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center and co-founder of the course, said the surroundings at Fort Story simulate situations corpsmen are likely to face overseas.
"Even though it's not urban assault in the alleys, we're still training to be in an austere environment, and kind of shifting toward what Afghanistan might be like," Craig said.
Lt. Shelly Maurer, a nurse who served in Afghanistan, runs the course. This week, five visitors from various Navy medical bureaucracies watched what unfolded at Fort Story. If all goes well, the course will be accredited as the East Coast hub for this pre-deployment medical training.
Maurer said the schedule already calls for 11 classes annually, with up to 40 students in a class. The frequency could double to twice a month, given the existing demand. The course is now mandatory for all enlisted medical personnel before they deploy overseas - and for all corpsmen every two years.
"This thing has taken on a life of its own," Maurer said.
Now the director of graduate medical education at Portsmouth, Craig developed his own version of the training after returning in 2005 from a seven-month deployment to a busy military trauma unit in Iraq.
He realized that medics and doctors alike needed better preparation for the vagaries of combat trauma. High-tech gadgets and supplies are worthless when you can't control the bleeding of a wounded Marine - or take care of your own injury. That's why one of the drills requires students to put tourniquets on themselves - then dictates they do it again, using their non dominant hand to apply a tourniquet to their dominant arm.
"If your dominant arm is shot, and you're bumbling and you've never done that before, how do you do it, watching your life bubble out of your arm?" Craig asked.
Maurer and Craig have worked together to align the course with standards at the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the National Operational Medicine Institute and the Naval Expeditionary Medical Training Institute.
A similar course is taught at Camp Pendleton, a California Marine Corps base.
Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com
Ellie