What have you seen Combat Medics do down range that was out of the scope of practice?

For some time the 68W school had very low admission requiremts while at the same time graduation requirements were as high as ever. This meant high attrition for folks who should never have even been let into that MOS. I know the navy corpsmen are a smaller cohort with higher standards expected. Just about every line medic who is sent as borrowed medical manpower to the local TMC has to be extensively trained to standards. It is important to realize too that many medics have some advanced college credit or else they worked civilian EMS. Invariably the really bright ones are not fully utilized while the underperforms --who should be doing motor stables work-- are sent to the TMC to triage troops who are suddenly ill on the morning of Brigade fun runs

There was a medic forward with us, PFC Ryan and I remember for a fact he was from Presque Isle, Maine. I know he gave me HIS clean pair of socks for which I was so grateful. He denied it but I KNOW. It wasn't just me, all of our boots were always wet as we all remember well.

The hardest thing is getting tech to the boots on ground. Took us years to get tourniquets mandatory. On the upside, dustoff is getting so quick these days that we can have most casualties at a role 2/3 within a few hours. It was common for us to get casualties below an hour from incident. The survival rate was nearing 100% if we could get them into surgery within the golden hour. But we need to keep pushing things like quick clot and smart tourniquets to the combat medics to maintain until they hit the role 3.

Great question/discussion right here! I served 14 1/2 years as a combat medic, so I believe I have some nuggets to share on this. When I deployed to Baghdad, Iraq in 2004, I had 12 years and E5 rank on my "belt", but volunteered to be a platoon line medic with my Infantry unit, since there were too many NCO's on FOB for sick call anyway, lol! My company and platoon often ran missions far from base, so I was expected to not only handle any "trauma" medicine we are trained for, but also do my level best to diagnose/assess routine or intermediate illnesses or treatments that many junior medics probably not have ability or experience on. As a young medic, my NCO's drilled into me to take personal responsibility to never stop training or learning, even if above scope! Never stop reading, learning, seeking, pestering PA's/Dr/RN, etc to get more experience and chance to be the best medic you can be. I often treated IRAQI FN's wounds, sutures, even dx and tx illnesses often. I was mostly complete with RN Education at that time, so DR/PA's trusted my judgement. AMEDD dept needs to push directive that those medics who strive for more than just meet standard, have more opportunities to climb medical ladder! I had to pursue RN on my own, no real help from ARMY on that, my only real "gripe".

My brother was a medic during the Cold War and he said if you worked hard enough and were reliable that doctors would let you do more.