Fort Campbell, KY – Blanchfield Army Community Hospital (BACH) Surgeon, Col. Daniel J. Stinner, MD, and BACH Advanced Trauma Life Support Coordinator Florencio Reyes, Jr. were among a team of military and civilian medical professionals who contributed to the article Optimizing Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS®) to Maximize Readiness published in Oxford University Press’ Military Medicine publication, May 27th, 2024.
According to the article text, the Army utilizes Individual Critical Task Lists to track and ensure competency and deployment readiness of its medical service members. These tasks include the skills and procedures that the Army has deemed foundationally requisite for each area of concentration/military occupational specialty.
The study concluded that optimizing and adapting the ATLS curriculum by adding and emphasizing certain combat casualty care-relevant skills, has proven successful at BACH, and could be used at other military treatment facilities to support deployment readiness by improving ICTL completion requirements.
By optimizing the ATLS course curriculum to facilitate ICTL completion, BACH has increased its ICTL completion rates, ATLS course exposure, and streamlined training requirements.
This solution for annual ICTL completion expands upon a standardized course, ATLS, commonly required for military medical providers, and was found that it could easily be replicated by other MTFs that serve as ATLS testing sites.
According to Stinner, the article’s authors agreed bringing the ATLS course to Fort Campbell was a logical next step to help the Fort Campbell military medical community maintain their readiness to perform combat casualty relevant care in the deployed environment. Stinner also went on to explain how this relates to Army and the broader military medicine community today.
“As we transition to an era of low combat casualty flow, our exposure to trauma patients and TCCC (Tactical Combat Casualty Care) significantly decreases from where it was 10 years ago. For our deployed medical providers to provide optimal care for the injured servicemember in their greatest time of need on the battlefield, we must maintain that skillset when we are in the garrison (home station, nondeployed) environment. The ATLS course offers a standardized process of maintaining several of our critical trauma skills,” stated Stinner.
Stinner highlighted the greater value of the group’s study.
“Our goal was to share our experience with the military medical community in case other sites might be interested in adopting our modifications to the course structure.”
For the complete article, follow this link: https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usae073
