TATRC support included six TEMPUS Pro™ physiological monitors, integrated into the Navy’s experimental Distributed Tactical Communications Systems (DTCS), allowing forward resuscitative care teams, on the ground and airborne, to transmit vital signs and other medical data over tactical communication systems to higher echelons of care to ensure situational awareness, get assistance, and prepare for the arrival of casualties.
All that is part of what MCWL calls the “Medical Common Operating Picture,” designed to provide future commanders and medical officers with real-time patient status during transit, the status and location of medical units and supplies, and disease tracking. TATRC and MCWL plan to continue this partnership at least through 2018, working to integrate ultra-wideband medical sensors and other en route care wireless medical capabilities, capture and transmit electronic point-of-care medical data with DTCS, and integrate medical data into the Tactical Cloud.
A first responder retrieves gauze from a first aid kit to treat a simulated wound during a TCCC course on Aug. 5, 2015. Among the standard items in kits issued to warfighters are Combat Application Tourniquets as well as coagulant bandages designed to stop or reduce bleeding.
U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Nicole Sikorski
Joint collaborative cooperation, experimentation, and development between TATRC and MCWL is essential to the success of future joint operations, according to the Corps. Through leveraging partnerships and innovations, the Army and Marine Corps can ensure that they are ready to provide the best possible care for the casualties of future wars.
Although the Air Force is not normally thought of as providing battlefield medical care, aside from long-distance patient transport, it, too, has benefitted from technological advances. The Critical Care Air Transport Team (CCATT), for example, provides C-130-based flying ambulance services and emergency medical care, when and where needed. According to the Air Force, that includes the only long-distance extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine in the world to provide cardiac and respiratory care.
Almost all U.S. Coast Guard cutters involved in potentially hazardous missions have basic first aid, emergency medical technicians, and corpsmen aboard. Not many smallboat stations have a corpsman, but every effort is made to have at least one EMT on each crew that does smallboat or boarding missions operating from a cutter, in case something arises that requires more than basic medical training.
“That’s as much to protect our own people as it is those with whom we interact in the maritime environment, having some immediate capability to triage or at least start them toward more advanced medical help if the situation requires it,” Capt. Daniel Deptula, Coast Guard chief of Contingency Preparedness and Exercise Policy, explained. “If advanced-level care is required, we would work to get that individual to the proper medical facility as quickly as possible.
Even so, there remain many gaps in the treatment available to wounded warfighters in the field. While a number of government agencies, universities, and private-industry labs are working to address most of those, many are looking to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for major future advances. Known for its pursuit of technologies and capabilities considered on the far edge of science, DARPA has established a Battlefield Medicine program to close current capability gaps in future combat zones.
“But we don’t have the capability for large numbers of personnel handing medical care. They do have a more advanced medical capability – and it’s not easy to get that EMT certification – but they aren’t doing higher-level care. So we also always have a Coast Guard flight surgeon available by phone to have a connection to advanced capability to give our folks in the field direction until they can reach a hospital. Sometimes we also have U.S. Navy doctors involved in that role.”
For the first few years of OIF/OEF, many serious injuries to the brain, eyesight, and hearing went under-reported – and untreated – on the battlefield, especially when caused by IEDs or other explosions that resulted in more visible, often life-threatening, wounds. Army medical officials estimate as many as 29 percent of all those wounded in combat also suffered eye injuries, for example, before the military mandated the use of ballistic glasses, which had been issued to deployed troops but often not used.