The Commanding General for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command (MRMC), Maj. Gen. Joseph Caravalho Jr., paid a visit to Tripler Army Medical Center (TAMC) to give a brief to TAMC staff on advancing medicine for the warfighter, June 23, 2014 at Kyser Auditorium.
MRMC is the Army's medical material developer, with responsibility for medical research, development, and acquisition and medical logistics management.
During the brief, Caravalho discussed the MRMC mission, capabilities and recent medical advances.
Caravalho says the valuable input of military medical staff, like those at Tripler, help his team to achieve success. "We cannot have our guys inventing stuff without you all telling us what you need. Our tag line is, 'we save lives'. What I've found is you guys are the ones touching the patients. You save lives. We like to think that we do the same."
He also shared a variety of future initiatives that may be considered to include freeze-dried plasma and an un-manned aerial vehicle with the capability of carrying an unattended patient.
Caravalho also shared cutting-edge technologies currently being utilized at the Army Burn Center in San Antonio, Texas which is part of the Institute of Surgical Research. Patients there are benefiting from new technologies that use a special printer designed to spray skin cells onto burn wounds.
Maj. Johnnie Robbins, Clinical Nurse Officer In Charge of the Adult Intensive Care Unit at Tripler, attended the informational brief and expressed his thoughts on the importance of informing TAMC staff about MRMC. "It's very valuable for staff not directly involved in research to show that great efforts and resources are being taken to decrease mortality and morbidity in a deployed environment and to show another facet of our delivery of medical care to our warfighters in a combat zone," said Robbins.
"This is a great time for military medicine," said Caravalho. "This is the time that [we] can move forward and start, improve or sustain the engagements we have mil-to-mil, civ-to-civ all over the world and certainly in your area of operation."
Medical information and products developed by the MRMC protect and sustain the health and safety of the force through deployment and combat.
Social Sharing