Whether students are at The Presidio of Monterey in California to learn a new language or earn a naval postgraduate degree, the staff at Madigan Army Medical Center's California Medical Detachment are there to care for both their physical and emotional health.
The heart of CAL MED's mission is the Presidio of Monterey Army Health Clinic, a patient-centered medical home and a pediatrics clinic. As the Madigan clinic furthest away from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the clinic also boasts one of the more unique patient populations. They care for tri-service patients and their dependents, as well as foreign military students, who attend the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and the Naval Postgraduate School. The Presidio PCMH, along with healthcare operations such as preventive medicine and behavioral health, make CAL MED the only Army medicine unit in central California.
"We're ... a clinic doing a military treatment facility mission; that's how I see us," said Capt. Lennin Castellon, their executive officer and deputy commander for administration. Even the Presidio PCMH is unique in taking on a pediatrics mission along with travel medicine.
With a student population, most of their patients are transient, whether they are at Monterey for 35 weeks for languages like French or for more than a year to learn languages like Chinese Mandarin. To support the school's language immersion programs, the clinic dedicates one nurse to immunizations alone, allowing students to travel to foreign countries for several weeks at a time to master their new trades.
While the tri-service component of their mission requires that primary care staff members be fluent in the medical regulations of all services for requirements like physical health assessments, the preventive medicine section extends CAL MED's reach to military installations as far as 100 miles away from their home base.
"Our preventive medicine department services all of central California providing epidemiology and disease surveillance, consultation services, work site surveys, and health/sanitation inspections," said Castellon. This includes areas like water testing and food safety testing at five regional bases and camps.
On site at Monterey, CAL MED cares for 8400 patients to include dependent children. With such a large mission, many of their 100 staff members wear multiple hats, said Castellon. They end up also being innovative and creating best practices out of initiatives like incorporating medical in-processing during weekly newcomers briefings in which students also are signed up for both RelayHealth and TRICARE Online.
On average, many of the CAL MED staff take on three to five different jobs, Castellon said.
"That to me is excellent work," he said.
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