Organized chaos: Corpsmen conduct hands-on training

Training is always important and is the key to being successful at any job. Military medical training does not easily translate to civilian medical training, and I do not believe that there is a way to fill this void for a number of reasons. In military medicine, the main focus is on quick action to save a life during major trauma. There is some minor focus on the clinical setting; however, unless the medic or corpsman works on a base clinic or hospital, they will see very few medical cases. A majority of military personnel are healthy young service members who do not require a lot of medical treatment. Of course there are cases of a sick soldier but this is not the same as taking care of renal patients, cardiac patients, or someone with a chronic respiratory problem. So without looking at research and statistics, I would say that less than 5%, maybe even 1% of patients that a military medic or corpsman would see will have these type of chronic issues or even acute exacerbation of chronic issues. However, having a base of knowledge would not be a bad idea.

On the opposite side of this, civilian healthcare providers or clinicians see a very small amount of multi-system trauma day to day, less than 5%, as compared to older, chronically ill patients. Of course working in a trauma center or surgical-trauma ICU would change this percentage. But even then, the training that we receive in a basic military medical training environment would not be siginificant enough to function effectively in a trauma center or ICU, an exception to this would be a special operations medic who has received some of this training. Taking care of a trauma or medical patient on a vent is very different from placing a King-LT airway and ventilating a patient with a BVM. Even a combat medic or corpmen, without any additional training, attempting to function at a Paramedic level would be difficult and set that servicemember up for failure. Again, even in civilian field medicine, i.e. Paramedicine, a majority of patient encounters day-to-day are going to be older, chronically ill medical patients requiring cardiac or respiratory assitance.

I guess that the only answer to this is to make a basic medic/corpsmen school longer and to incorporate all aspects of care, including pediatric and geriatric. It would be nice to see the various branches utilize national standard Paramedic training as the base of knowledge for all medical personnel; however, I believe that this would not be very cost effective for the Department of Defense because how often would the average medic or corpsman utilize this level of training.

This response was probably far beyond what was being asked here; however, I hope that this may give some insight to why things are the way they are.

some of the best training is Hands on and bring th team members in so they know what to do\o and how to help...

This isn't anything new. I was an instructor for 1st MLG Tacticle Readiness Training on Camp Pendleton, Ca. It's very important training, before the $20k+ medical manincans were utilized we use to run our HM's and TCCC/CLS trained Marines through live tissue training that was contracted out. For the last 10 plus years the quality of FMF Corpsman and trained Marines have substantially lowered the mortality rate in combat settings. Increased technology and funding have greatly increased our capabilities to enhance the abilities and lower the chance for a young HM or Marine to freeze when faced with a true trauma in real time.