JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, TX –
Marines know when they’re sent to the front lines, a U.S.
Navy corpsman will be right there with them. Hospital corpsmen, better known as
“Doc,” are medical specialists similar to civilian physicians’ assistants, but
without the years of training and under the added pressure of providing medical
care in the field or anywhere else the Navy decides.
The Basic Medical Technician Corpsman Program is a 14-week
introductory course in the delivery of medical care.
Students are provided formal education and training that
develops them into entry-level medical technicians and corpsmen within fixed
and deployable medical facilities.
They receive instruction on medical terminology, anatomy and
physiology, basic life support, emergency medical technician-basic curricula,
as well as various aspects of nursing and primary patient care, including nutrition,
cardiac life support, first aid procedures, infection control, universal
precautions, vital signs, intravenous care, wound care management, history
taking and physical assessment, as well as customer service.
Corpsmen get a crash course on the cardiovascular, or
circulatory system, which consists of the heart, blood, and blood vessels. They
start with key terms such as atria, ventricle, artery, vein, capillary, red and
white blood cells, plasma, blood pressure, hypertension, pacemaker and shock.
Students learn that the heart is a muscle about the size of
your fist, located in the center of the chest; that it has four chambers,
responsible for pumping blood through the heart, past multiple valves and out
to the body via blood vessels. These vessels are described by their function,
location and whether they carry blood away from or to the heart.
Corpsmen must also understand that the heart does not work
alone. It is paired closely with the lungs, and one without the other leads to
death.
The functions and effects of these two systems are so
intertwined that they are often referred to as the cardiopulmonary system. It
becomes crystal clear that the main purpose of the heart is to deliver oxygen
and nutrients to all the body’s organs such as the brain, kidneys, eyes, liver
and skin.
It is because of this newly obtained knowledge and hands-on
training that our hospital corpsmen are then able to identify and treat cardiac
emergencies, such as coronary artery disease, aneurysm, dysrhythmia, angina
pectoris, acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), congestive heart failure
and cardiac arrest.
As a BMTCP instructor, registered nurse and prior hospital
corpsman myself, I know about the effectiveness of the training students
receive in our program, but I think a student’s perspective speaks volumes
“What I already knew about the heart is that without it we
would die,” said one Navy student. “What I didn’t understand was how it was
like a pump, automatic at first, but when necessary, could be run manually.”
“Something which I found extremely interesting was that when
you have a myocardial infarction it actually kills a little bit of your heart
muscle,” another Navy student noted. “That bit of the heart is now incapable of
ever functioning again and now the rest of the heart is having to compensate
for normal productivity.”