The vast majority of SOF deployments occur outside combat zones where the SOF Medic is expected to care for the entire team without a credentialed provider.
Faced with a low level of risk, SOF Commanders opt to accept it.
The team also willingly accepts it due to the confidence that they have in the Medic.
Medics and Corpsmen bear the burden of the risk assumed by the Commander.
There is no Doc.
No PA.
No dentist or Vet.
No surgical team or MEDEVAC standing by.
What can be done? Hint… It’s training
In 2019 a US News investigation into the readiness of the military trauma system concluded with a series of articles to support what we already “knew” and were moving to address with the development of PFC Clinical Practice Guidelines, training events and tailoring hospital rotations.
One of the PFC Truths is that If you think you need a surgical team or intensivist, you should bring one. If there already aren’t enough to go around to higher risk deployments, bringing one to the lower risk trips may not even be an option. Guys still get hurt on these trips.
“No one minds deploying, but it is too often, and since there’s usually not much to do [surgically], I know we lose our skills,” says an active-duty military surgeon.
Even the former Trauma Consultant to the former Army Surgeon General weighed in with a 13-page opinion on the topic summarized in the series:
“The Forgotten Surgeon Warriors.”
Once the surgeons openly (somewhat) established that bringing a whole surgical team, even a small one, to every deployment is just not a plausible solution, many attempts were made to increase the scope of practice of the enlisted clinician. This was a second order effect of the campaign to improve battlefield surgery along with the growing realization of this lack of support.
What can be done? The first thing that should be implemented more widely is honesty. We need to be honest with ourselves first. What are our capabilities and limitations relative to our training and experience overlaid onto caring for the complex casualties that we may expect to see? Once we come to terms with that, we need to accurately convey these limitations to Commanders who are charged with assuming the risk. There should be a frank conversation about doctrinal evacuation timelines and policy compared to the pathophysiology with some of the more dangerous possibilities such as blunt trauma from a vehicle rollover, falls, envenomations, training accidents and other DNBI. “The stuff that keeps Medics up at night.” As stated by JB early on.
If the mission is to include higher risk activity, then a surgical team should rightly be requested. At the end of the day though, as noted above, there may just not be enough to go around. If given the choice, we would probably all take a small surgical team with us so that we could focus on other aspects of the mission. This is where honesty comes in again. Just like the early days of the GWOT when every casualty was “Urgent Surgical” and over triage caused some misallocation of resources, an honest and critical assessment will bear out the actual risks and probability. That still leaves some risk to force that the Commander may assume. That is the reason that additional training experience is crucial. That is why we are so adamant on being great at the basics but also going a little beyond. No one is coming, not in time anyway. It is our job to recognize a bad situation early, use telemedicine when possible and temporize to the best of our ability, not to be a one man surgical team. This is instilled through rigorous and realistic training.
Training and Utilization.
Not Stuff.
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