Options for Maintaining Clinical Proficiency During Peacetime

📖 The Scoop

The U.S. Army Medical Department has a dual mission: to care for the war wounded during times of conflict and to operate medical treatment facilities (MTFs) that provide care to service members, their beneficiaries, and military retirees. Because the injuries that require treatment during wartime can be very different from the case mix seen in MTFs, the Army asked RAND Arroyo Center to identify ways to help providers prepare for wartime missions while they are stationed at home. Using a variety of data sources, RAND Arroyo Center quantified how providers were assigned during wartime relative to their home duties, how the types of procedures seen in theater compared with those performed at home-station MTFs, and the rate at which providers attended mandatory predeployment trauma training (PDTT). In addition, the research team interviewed previously deployed providers to gather their perspectives on how they prepared-clinically and for trauma specifically-for the deployment mission, what their roles were in theater and how their patient mix in theater differed from the types of cases they treated in MTFs, and what additional training or other preparation would have helped them for the deployment mission.

Genre: History / Military / General (fancy, right?)