Reducing battlefield deaths goal of medical fellowship

By David VergunJanuary 14, 2014

Military Emergency Medical Services and Disaster Medicine Fellowship Program
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Jan. 13, 2014) -- A physician who was a former Army Special Forces combat medic designed a fellowship program, which he hopes will improve the survival chances of battlefield casualties.

The aim of the Military Emergency Medical Services and Disaster Medicine Fellowship Program is to train physicians for the "challenges of pre-hospital care" on the battlefield, in defense of the homeland or wherever else troops may be, according to Lt. Col. (Dr.) Robert Mabry, the fellowship's program director, at San Antonio Military Medical Center.

"Pre-hospital care" is that critical time between a traumatic event and when care is received at a military treatment facility, or MTF.

Mabry and his colleagues authored a study of service members injured on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2011. The study found that of the 4,596 battlefield fatalities analyzed, 87.3 percent died of their injuries before ever reaching an MTF.

Of those pre-MTF deaths, 75.7 percent were classified as non-survivable, meaning they would have died even had they reached the MTF earlier, and 24.3 percent were deemed potentially survivable.

That study, the first of its kind, was published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, in 2012.

NO ONE 'OWNS' BATTLEFIELD CARE

Although battlefield medicine has vastly improved during every war since World War II, Mabry said that 24.3 percent statistic cited in his study -- those who died who might have been salvaged -- kept nagging him. "That's where we can make the biggest difference in improving patient outcomes," he said.

What Mabry found is that no one "owns" responsibility for battlefield care delivery, meaning that "no single senior military medical leader, directorate, division or command is uniquely focused on battlefield care. The diffusion of responsibility is a result of multiple agencies, leaders and units of the service medical departments each claiming bits and pieces with no single entity responsible for patient outcomes forward of the combat hospitals," he said.

Commanders on the ground do own the assets of battlefield care -- medics, battalion physicians, physician assistants, flight medics and all the equipment -- but they are "neither experts in, nor do they have the resources to train their medical providers for forward medical care," he said.

Commanders rely on the medical departments to provide the right personnel, training, equipment and doctrine, he continued, but the medical departments "defer responsibility to line commanders," Mabry said. "While this division of responsibility may at first glance seem reasonable, the net negative effect of line commanders lacking expertise and medical leaders lacking operational control is analogous to the axiom 'when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.'"

One of the main difficulties in addressing pre-hospital care, Mabry said, is that "we know very little about what care is provided before casualties reach the combat hospital."

RANGERS TRACK COMBAT CARE

Only one military unit -- the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment -- tracks what happens to every casualty during all phases of care, he said.

"Ranger commanders routinely use this data to improve their casualty response systems," Mabry said, adding that the Rangers "are the only U.S. military unit that can demonstrate no potentially preventable deaths in the pre-hospital setting after more than a decade of combat."

While only the 75th Rangers did pre-hospital tracking, once the wounded arrived at a combat support hospital, or CASH, they were met with "robust surgical support and had less than a two percent chance of dying," he said.

Those who did die at the CASH generally had a severe head injury or were in profound shock due to the loss of blood when they arrived -- yet some of these who died in the CSH had conditions that were "potentially salvageable, had they had some aggressive resuscitation in the field," he added.

But the culture of military medicine is "hospital based," he reiterated, and "no one owns battlefield medicine."

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The hospital-based mentality has its roots in the Cold War. During Vietnam and later, the idea was to "put as many patients as possible in a helicopter and fly them as fast as you can to get them off the battlefield to the field hospital," Mabry said.

After Vietnam, those doctors, nurses and medics returned to the U.S., took off their uniforms and "built our civilian trauma systems," he said, noting that before Vietnam, EMS, trauma surgery and emergency medicine didn't exist as we know them today.

As a result of the war experience, sick or injured civilians in the U.S. today get transported to a trauma center by helicopter, accompanied by a critical-care flight paramedic and a critical-care flight nurse -- both highly trained and very experienced.

"Civilians took the ball, ran with it and significantly evolved their processes to an advanced standard of care," Mabry said.

"But we stayed with our Vietnam model, focusing on speed," he said. "So the two models are incredibly different."

In Afghanistan, speed became a problem, though, he said.

"When I was deployed in 2005, I would have to wait three hours for medevacs sometimes and if it were a host-nation casualty, sometimes even longer," he explained.

And then the level of care in-flight was less than premium.

"The medics, through no fault of their own, were still trained at the basic medic level," Mabry said. "At that time, flight medics had no requirement to provide any hands-on care to an actual patient during their training. For many, their first encounter with a seriously injured casualty was during the first flight of their first deployment."

CLOSING THE GAP

What Mabry concluded from his studies and field experience was that the solution to the gap in care cannot be addressed with a single-bandage approach.

A solution, he said, would require "evidence-based improvements in tactical combat casualty care guidelines, data-driven research, remediation of gaps in care and updated training and equipment."

And to supervise those medics, their training and the medevac equipment and procedures, there would need to be a specially trained and qualified physician in charge of that pre-hospital phase, he said.

Mabry's own experience includes 11 years as an enlisted Solider, starting out in the infantry and then becoming a Special Forces medic with a tour in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, during the battle made famous in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."

He said those experiences had a profound impact on him and shaped his desire to become an Army doctor, which he did.

He later returned to Special Forces as a battalion surgeon and served tours in Afghanistan, in 2005 and 2010.

Mabry illustrated the power of patient outcome data and how it can drive changes in military medicine -- something he hopes to do with his fellowship program.

His team tracked down a National Guard medevac unit from California whose members were mostly all critical-care trained paramedics in their day jobs -- working for the California Highway Patrol and other stateside EMS agencies.

They deployed to Afghanistan about four years ago, taking their civilian EMS model with them, he said.

"I compared their patient outcomes to the standard medevac outcomes and found a 66 percent reduction in mortality using the civilian medic system," he said.

As a result of that outcome, the Army revamped its training of flight medics.

NEW AIRWAY OPENER

Another example of how patient outcome data can drive procedural changes is in airway treatment. He explained:

"If you get an airway injury in the field, you're usually shot in the neck or in the face and have a traumatic disruption of the airway. We did a study showing that when medics perform a cricothyrotomy" -- cutting an incision in the neck so patients can breathe -- "we found they failed at that procedure about 30 percent of the time."

It's a very high-risk, high-stress, yet ultimately life-saving procedure, he continued. "So armed with that data we went back and figured out a way to make the procedure smoother and simpler," he explained. And now medics have a tool that will make them more proficient at doing cricothyrotomies.

"So that's what I'm trying to get at," he said, "training physician leaders who can look at problems or opportunities for improvements in the field, who have the ability to articulate how to improve systems, give medics better training, better tools, and so to improve patient outcomes. We want doctors who can look at the data and training and protocols, and use research to solve those battlefield pre-hospital problems."

Examples of what those physicians might do include understanding the injury patterns for a particular unit and locality, analyzing the trauma transfer system, and seeing where the medics might need more training, Mabry said. The physician could also look across the medical research environment and determine which new therapies to incorporate for patient outcome improvements.

The sort of system Mabry said he's describing is similar to what civilian EMS directors do stateside.

TRAINING UNDERWAY

This summer, the first fellow will graduate from the two-year curriculum.

The first year is the civilian EMS fellowship, accredited by the American Council on Graduate Medical Education and the American Board of Emergency Medicine.

"We're one of the first EMS programs in the U.S. to be accredited, so we're excited about that," he said. The program was accredited in October 2012.

During that first year, the docs work at a big-city EMS agency, learning the system of systems of EMS. By system of systems, Mabry refers to the overall EMS system which is composed of other systems -- ambulances, helicopters, personnel, training, protocols, trauma destinations, communications, medical equipment and so on.

This enables them to be able to direct a military EMS system, he explained.

The second year is the military portion which is non-accredited. Each service has its own unique requirements, he said. In the Army, for example, the doc would work with the battalion medical officers at the Tactical Combat Medical Care course, participate in medic training at the combat medic school house, and see how this all works at the strategic level at the Institute of Surgical Research and Joint Trauma System in San Antonio.

Additionally, the fellows will learn about homeland security medical procedures and integrate with local, regional and national disaster planners, Mabry said. And, they learn about international disaster support -- things like earthquakes and tsunamis that the services might be called upon to support.

As if that weren't enough, during this entire two-year period the fellows are studying for a Masters of Public Health degree in the evenings.

The Masters of Public Health degree "gives them the ability to use epidemiology, statistics and a public health model to go in and say 'hey, look, here's the challenge we have in this particular area.' They can then articulate from a policy level how this affects the population or health problem, conduct an analysis and then (know) how to make a case for resources, policy changes and things like that," he said.

FIRST FELLOWSHIPS

As for the fellow who graduates this summer, his curriculum looked like this, Mabry explained:

His first year was with the San Antonio Fire Department EMS. For his second year, he attended the National Park Service Search and Rescue course, and did his public health practicum with the Joint Trauma System. He also has worked with the Army Medical Department's Center and School as well as participating in a number of policy and research projects.

He's now at Johns Hopkins University attending the Health Emergencies in Large Populations Course, designed primarily for international disaster relief work. He's working with some of the world's leading experts in the field, Mabry added.

Then he goes to the flight surgeon course. Upon completion of his fellowship June 30, he's projected to go to Afghanistan for six months to work in the Joint Trauma System as the pre-hospital director. His follow-on assignment will be in the Army's Critical Care Flight Paramedic Training Program in San Antonio.

Other than Mabry, there are currently three fellows going through their first year: one Air Force and two Army doctors.

For next year, Mabry said he hopes to get a Navy doc in the fellowship -- the Navy currently is not providing the funding for the fellowship. So the idea is to get three fellows a year, representing each of the services, he said.

Once the physicians complete their fellowships, Mabry said the goal is to get them in positions where their training will make a difference: division surgeons, brigade surgeons, Special Forces group surgeons, directors of trauma systems, training programs and so on.

While military doctors are already highly trained and motivated, Mabry said he's looking for those who think outside the box, see problems from unique perspectives and perform at all levels: leadership, research, training, problem solving.

Eventually, Mabry hopes to build a cadre who collaborate across the services to "shed light on that battlefield blind spot" of pre-hospital care and change the mindset from hospital-centric care to one that provides state-of-the-art care across the entire chain of survival, starting in the pre-hospital setting at the point of injury.

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