Photo By Joseph Siemandel | Guard members from the 181st Brigade Support Battalion take part in a medical...... read more read more
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A group of soldiers lay on the ground, wounded and in pain. Their defensive position was attacked, leaving them in need of medical assistance and fast. It’s a position that no medical professional wants to find themself in, racing the clock to save their fellow service members lives, knowing that each minute is precious.
To be ready if they receive that call, Guard members of Charlie Company, 181st Brigade Support Battalion are spending part of their annual training conducting medical evacuations and field hospital operations exercises at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.
“Part of this annual training we wanted to train on taking injured soldiers from their defensive positions to a casualty collection point,” said Maj. Jim Kovell, an Army Medical Officer and commander of Charlie Company, 181st Brigade Support Battalion.
In the scenario-based training, soldiers in the defensive position were attacked, defended off the threat and were pulled to a casualty collection point for tactical combat casualty care. “Charlie Med” then deployed their medical evacuation platoon to load the injured soldiers into a Stryker ambulance and taken to a field hospital. Once at the field hospital the medical professionals on the ground would triage the members, identify their needs, and prepare them for movement to a large medical facility.
“This is a fantastic team. They really just want to train on this and it is fantastic to have the senior members leading in the exercise and the junior members taking initiative to complete the tasks,” said Kovell.
The most senior member of the team is Lt. Col Chad Ulrich, who in his civilian capacity is an emergency medicine physician at UW Medicine-Valley Medical Center in Renton. His role this annual training is to help train up the younger medical professionals, providing them the real world stresses he faces on a daily basis but in a place to learn their craft.
“I was giving the vital signs and the injuries,” Ulrich said. “In the real world I would be supervising both the bed and providing overview and stepping in to do a procedure if one of my other providers couldn’t. One of the challenges that Army medicine faces is getting real world reps, so having that knowledge and experience from the civilian sector really prepares us for these critical missions.”
Ulrich credits the young medical professionals in the unit with continuing to jump at the chance to learn the medical craft and being a part of the Guard.
“I am continually amazed at these young 20 year olds that are going to college and then come out here hungry to learn,” said Ulrich.
One of those young soldiers is Private 1st Class Maher Modak, a 20-year-old combat medic from Seattle. His role in the exercise was recording the medics’ comments about the injured patients and what treatments had been given. The job seems easy but making sure to listen and hear everything being said over the noise and chaos of the operating floor is difficult.
“The team lead made sure that we were all at a good level, that we could all understand and speak clearly with one another,” said Modak. “It was so cool to be a part of that.”
Modak joined the Guard to start on the path to being a doctor. He applied for West Point in hopes of becoming an Army Medical officer and then attending medical school and bringing that experience back home to the Northwest.
| Date Taken: | 07.22.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 07.22.2022 17:37 |
| Story ID: | 425626 |
| Location: | JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 314 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, "Charlie Med" sees benefit of training on real world scenarios, by Joseph Siemandel, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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