FORT RUCKER, Ala. (March 5, 2015) -- Lives are saved and lost daily at this school.
Fortunately, it's a few good mannequins who do the surviving and dying, all in the name of building better medical evacuation service members at the U.S. Army School of Aviation Medicine Joint Enroute Care Course and Army Medical Department Aviation Crewmember Course.
The courses take doctors, physician assistants, nurses and medics out of the hospitals and trains them up to perform the MedEvac mission to save the lives of wounded service members around the world, said Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Burrows, NCO in charge of the USASAM JECC and AMEDD A2C2.
"Many of our students are nurses and docs who never get to see pre-hospital care at all," Burrows said. "They're already medically trained -- we're just getting them used to doing it this way. It's a big learning curve because they're used to having up to 10 people around one patient -- 'Hey, you do this, you do this, you do this,' and being able to divide up those tasks, versus in the back of an aircraft with point of injury care -- it's just them.
"They get that bird's eye view of how to perform an actual patient assessment in the pre-hospital setting, how to do that advanced medical care that is that rapid treatment that's going to stabilize (the patient) enough to enable them to survive until they get to that surgical intervention," he added.
With JECC being a two-week course, the information comes at students hot and heavy, and the realism the school provides ups the intensity, according to 1st Lt. Christopher Hunt, a physician assistant from the 115th Combat Hospital at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
"I thought it was the best course in the Army I've been to so far," the lieutenant said during the final day of the latest course Feb. 19. "Honestly, there's a lot of information packed into two weeks and it's solid -- not a lot of fluff in it at all."
One source of that realism comes from the mannequins that give off real vital signs and show reactions to their wounds, such as coughing, and also respond to treatment the students provide. Instructors operate the mannequins from computers outside the mock fuselages in the school's training facility.
"This training is probably best you're going to get other than treating real patients," Burrows said. "(Creating the curriculum is) a continuous cycle, we make adjustments and changes each iteration -- we continue to progress, try to get more advanced, more realistic as far as treatment and scenarios. All of our scenarios are designed based off of actual patients that we have seen downrange. All scenarios you see are extremely realistic and they are exactly the scenarios that were seen downrange."
But realism also comes in the form of a dedicated cadre who inserts its years of experience saving Soldiers' lives on real-world battlefields for more than a decade, Burrows said, adding the training is leaps and bounds ahead of the training he received seven years ago.
"Honestly, the standard with this instructor group, compared to the standard from when I went to flight medic school compared to now is top tier -- just because our command and everybody that is here, all we think about is, 'how do we make the training better how do we make it more realistic?'" he said. "With us, this instructor corps, we've all had multiple deployments, and we know what works and what doesn't work, and we're able to come here and use our experiences."
Above and beyond the MedEvac portion of the class, students also get water survival and survival training, and Hunt said the water survival portion proved his biggest challenge during the course.
"Somebody purposely putting you under water and flipping you upside down, and you have to hold your breath for so long and then get out and not to panic was the biggest thing," he said. "I'm from California, I've swam in the ocean, but I've never been flipped upside down and told to get out of a seatbelt and then get out of the water. I tried to prepare for it, but it's hard to fully get it into your head what it will be like."
The JECC teaches Army, Navy and Air Force flight medics, along with the occasional members of the Coast Guard, and also international medics. Each class is usually between 20-30 students, but the minimum is 10 and the maximum is 35, according to Burrows. The cadre varies between nine or 10 instructors.
And that cadre is confident that the graduates of the school have the skill sets they will need to go out and save lives, said Sgt. 1st Class Timothy White, flight medic, instructor and operations NCOIC for the school.
"We train them the best we can -- make it as realistic as possible, give them real-world scenarios and actual standards, show them what is actually out there and then train them to meet that mission requirement," he said. "Anyone who graduates from any of our courses, when they leave here, they have the tools to conduct the mission based on what they learned here. They're ready to go once they're done training."
And that's the mission: building better MedEvac operators -- ready to go save the lives of their comrades in arms, and leave the dying part to the mannequins.
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