Photo By Sgt. William White | Army Sgt. James Morgan, a medic with the 581st Area Support Medical Company, 61st...... read more read more
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BECKLEY, W.Va. - Army medical units from across the nation are providing integral support to a truly unique mission here at the 2013 National Scout Jamboree, Fayette County, W.Va.
The scope of the mission is constructed of several different agencies and requires the Army to coordinate carefully with the other civilian elements.
“This is a truly integrated system,” said Paul Seamann, director of operations for Jan-Care Ambulances. “There has been very close collaboration between the visions here.”
Army support is met by the efforts of the Emergency Medical Service and Jan-Care Ambulances, a private ambulance company of southern West Virginia, to provide medical treatment and evacuation to more than 1,000 service members, 10,000 Boy Scout Jamboree staff and volunteers and more than 40,000 scout participants. The three agencies have created an emergency medical response system on a remote mountainous area of more than 10,000 acres.
The Army medical support, known as Task Force Medical, is commanded by Lt. Col. Dirk LaFleur and combines elements of Active Duty and National Guard soldiers. It provides several ingredients to the medical mission including stabilization, ground evacuation and some medical augmentation.
Units out of Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Benning, Ga., use Field Litter Ambulances to provide much of the medical evacuation for the event.
“We’re providing ground ambulance support to the Boy Scout Jamboree, transporting patients if they get hurt,” said Staff Sgt. Ronald Rincon, a medic with the 581st Area Support Medical Company, 61st Multifunctional Medical Battalion, 1st Medical Brigade. “We’re working with a civilian ambulance company responding together to calls.”
Rincon said that the Army FLAs easily navigate areas that the civilian ambulances may have difficulty reaching.
“The area here is very mountainous so some of the civilian ambulances are not able to reach the areas that we can,” said Rincon. “So we’ll set up an ambulance exchange point and turn the patients over to our civilian counterparts.”
With such a high volume of participants, venturesome activities paired with rocky terrain produce regular injuries across the mountains, and the ambulances are there to respond.
“There’s a lot of high-action areas, situations with heat, situations where injuries might occur as you might expect when people are doing high action activities,” Seamann said.
“We’re transporting numerous people within the scouts, visitors and volunteers within the site each day,” said Seamann. “We’re treating this like a second county and there’s almost a county’s worth of transports each day.”
Seamann said the mission supporting the Boy Scouts would not be possible without the help of the Army.
“The collaboration [with the military] is essential for this to operate,” said Seamann. “Every vehicle out there has been in constant motion to ensure the safety of the scouts, volunteers and visitors on the Summit property here.”
Other soldiers of Task Force Med are providing technical supporting roles in specific areas of the medical mission.
“We’re working with civilian orthopedic doctors providing diagnostic images and X-ray support,” said Sgt. Charles Mays, a radiology technician with the 581st Area Support Medical Company, 61st Multifunctional Medical Battalion, 1st Medical Brigade. “Whether it’s a scout, scout leader, civilian volunteer or military, we provide the x-ray and see whether they have a break, a dislocation, a fracture or anything of that nature.”
Mays said that this mission gives him a chance to not only perform his military duties, but also to influence the future leaders of America.
“It’s an honor being here. We’re definitely ambassadors for the United States Army and this gives us a chance to set a good example for some of these kids who might become Army leaders in the future.”
| Date Taken: | 07.18.2013 |
| Date Posted: | 07.23.2013 13:50 |
| Story ID: | 110653 |
| Location: | WEST VIRGINIA, US |
| Web Views: | 287 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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