FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas –
Experts from the U.S Army Institute of Surgical Research at
Fort Sam Houston presented data at the Military Health System Research
Symposium in Fort Lauderdale Beach, Fla., Aug. 19, to introduce a five-year
study evaluating utilization of Role 2 forward surgical capabilities, trauma
care on the battlefield and highlighting possible ways to optimize care for
wounded warriors.
“The study that we are working on is to learn from our
current and our past to plan for our future,” said Lt. Col. Elizabeth Mann-Salinas,
a USAISR nurse scientist who presented the project, funded by the U.S. Army
Medical Research and Materiel Command’s Congressionally Directed Medical
Research Programs.
To provide the best care of wounded warriors, the Army
leverages five echelons of care, including:
• Role 1 – care provided at the point of injury
• Role 2 – life-saving interventions provided by a medical
staff at a forward surgical team
• Role 3 – care at a combat support hospital
• Role 4 – care provided at hospitals, such as Landstuhl
Regional Medical Center in Germany
• Role 5 – definitive care at a military treatment center
stateside, such as the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in
Bethesda, Md.
“From our estimation, we have woefully overlooked the
importance of evaluating how we are using the Forward Surgical Team (Role 2)
capacity to inform how we are going to move forward to train for future
contingencies,” Mann-Salinas said. “This is particularly relevant given the
emphasis on the expectation of the ‘prolonged field care’ in other military
theaters of operation.”
Mann-Salinas explained the study is to evaluate the
historical utilization of Role 2 assets in recent conflicts to optimize
pre-deployment readiness of combat casualty care providers.
“We want to look at how we’ve done it in the past. We want
to do some sophisticated modeling predictive features to try to come up with
better point of injury care,” Mann-Salinas said. “But my real passion is
getting the person who is going to be delivering that care up to that standard
of everybody else on their team and it doesn’t matter what uniform – active or
reserve status – that you come from. We all must be prepared to do the same job
and deliver the best possible care to our wounded warriors on the battlefield.”
The need for evaluating battlefield combat casualty care is
recognized internationally and as a result, the Role 2 project is a component
of the formal US-UK partnership.
In 2011, President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister
David Cameron created the “US-UK Service Personnel, Families and Veterans Task
Force,” comprised of five working groups covering issues from transition to
civilian life, mental health, rehabilitation, family support and medical
interoperability.
Additionally, a formal cooperative research agreement was
established with the Israeli Defense Force to compare our experiences in modern
combat casualty care. The preliminary results of this comparison were presented
at this year’s conference.
“I believe that if we understand how we’ve used Role 2 in
the past that it will help us be better trained in the future for providing
combat casualty care,” Mann-Salinas added.