Shaping the Future of Army Medicine: Part 1: AMEDD Captain’s Career Course

It makes no sense for the actual providers to attend some mostly logistical course for that continuous amount of time and be away from patient care (the thing they are trained and paid to do in combat). Yes for Medical Service and regular nurses who do no patient care after making CPT and go into some leadership billet; no for surgeons and anesthesia providers in my opinion or at least break it up into manageable sections with breaks.

I enjoyed the CCC a great deal but felt it should either go away or be longer. Those of us with licenses that DHA will need to pay someone else to provide our care, six months is way to long. You can take 70 series officers away for six months and those of us with licenses can fill in to some degree but it does not work the other way around. Right now ICU nurses are being offered $35,000/a yr for a six year commitment, that adds $17,500 to the cost of the course if six months.

Good luck getting any provider in the guard or reserves to complete this if it gets expanded to that long of a course.

I commissioned in 2018. I’ve already been gone 4 weeks for DCC. Did the 2 weeks worth of BOLC phase I online on my own time. Getting ready to attend nearly the 4 weeks of BOLC phase II. That means in just over 1 years worth of time in the reserves I’ve put in almost 3 months worth of training and been away from my civilian job and patient care for nearly 2 months.

Thankfully I work for the VA and we get 3 weeks of paid military leave, but I will be going on leave without pay status to complete BOLC phase II and the military pay for an O-3 doesn’t come close to matching the week to two weeks of LWOP I will have for my civilian job. If they made CCC 6 months long you can forget many folks completing it. If you want to put me on orders for 6 months for active duty and cut me a dd214 then I would be ok with it, but my employer wouldn’t like it and if someone has their own practice or works in a small hospital as a specialist it would be a real hardship.