AR-MEDCOM CG tells NATO conference how to build ‘the consummate military medical professional’

BRU, BELGIUM

02.02.2024

Story by Sgt. 1st Class Neil W. McCabe 

Army Reserve Medical Command

[NATO Headquarters, BRUSSELS] The Army Reserve Medical Command’s commanding general Feb. 2 delivered the keynote address at the Interallied Confederation of Medical Reserve Officers Mid-Winter Conference at NATO headquarters here about how to strengthen the professional military medical culture and his three-legged stool reference upon which every military medical professional must stand.

Among the members of NATO and the European Union, there are differences, and their members are not the same; for example, Turkey is in NATO, but not in the EU and Ireland is not part of NATO, but it is in the EU, but all these nations share values that bring them together for a shared purpose, said Maj. Gen. W. Scott Lynn, who took command of AR-MEDCOM June 26, 2022.

“I call those some foundational values, they kind of give us the springboard or the base from which NATO can do certain things,” the general said, directing his remarks to the junior officers present at the CIOMR forum. The acronym CIOMR, comes from the organization’s French name, Confédération Interalliée des Officiers Médicaux de Réserve. In the same way, NATO, is also represented as OTAN for Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord.

“I look at all those things collectively,” he said. “We've got unity of effort at the top, where we're going, what we're trying to do. We've got foundational values, those building blocks that we have on the bottom.”

The challenges facing NATO are not conflicting values, but different methods, which he called mechanisms of action, he said.

“Mechanism of action is how we go from our foundational values to the mission, and those mechanisms of action vary significantly when you look at different countries,” he said.

“Different nations may have different doctrines on how you fight on the battlefield in the operational realm or the tactical realm or even the strategic realm leadership,” he said.

“We've got different models for leadership in different countries, especially within the medical portion of each of our military forces,” he said.

“Differences in the way that military health systems are structured in different countries.”

In the same way, different countries approach military medicine differently, he said.

The general said the American military has spread the burden of military medical services between the active and reserve components.

Fifty percent of the U.S. Army’s medical capacity comes from the Army Reserve, which is split among three two-star commands, AR-MEDCOM, 3rd Medical Command (Deployment Support) and 807th Medical Support (Deployment Support), he said.

Both 3rd Medical Command and 807th Medical Command are field commands, which have deployable units, such as Army Field Hospitals, the general said.

The Army Reserve Medical Command units and Soldiers mobilize, but not in the same way as the two field medical commands, he said.

AR-MEDCOM consists of roughly 8,000 Soldiers with approximately 1,500 combat medics, and it is the institutionally-supporting portion of the Army Reserve, he said. “Just to give you an idea of the scope of Army Reserve Medical Command, our headquarters is in Florida, but we've got units scattered throughout the continental U.S., so it’s a pretty big unit, and we play a unique role in Army Reserve medicine in the U.S.”

Soldiers at AR-MEDCOM support Big Army by operating major training exercises, managing medical students and cadets, backfilling domestic units, and its long-standing support mission at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

The general said unlike in other countries, the U.S. military keeps a sizable piece of its military medical personnel on active-duty, the general said.

“In our sister countries, for instance, Finland, most of their medical system is embedded into the civilian system,” he said.

Lynn told the audience of junior and senior medical officers, diplomats and other international security officials that military medical professionals need to navigate through ambiguities.

“We have political ambiguity to some degree in different countries,” he said. “We may have economic uncertainty going on. We've got different cultural things that we have to account for in our political systems as we turn those things into action on the military, battlefield consensus technology.”

The way to succeed through the ambiguity is to seek ways to fuse a unity of effort, Lynn said.

“You see the context for how NATO does things. We take some common values, we try to engender unity of effort and we have mechanisms of actions to go from point A to point B,” he said.

Military medical professionals must have military skills, medical skills and soft skills

The general said he relies on a three-legged stool to build a military medical Soldier: military medicine, compassion and soft skills.

“We don’t typically talk about it in the military setting, and only through addressing each of these areas can you have the consummate military medical professional,” Lynn said.

“That’s something unique that we do on the battlefield that the combat arm soldiers are not doing,” said the general who was commissioned in 1989 as a field artillery officer.

“They have to be proficient within their military skills and whatever their specialty skills are, but they really don't have any mandate to show compassion on the battlefield like we do,” he said. “That’s unique to our situation.”

Lynn: Military medical professionals need military skills

Lynn said in the U.S. military there is an intense induction process because it is the introduction to a culture and a profession with significant consequences.

“You get inculpated with our values, our culture and our traditions,” he said.

“First day, basic training, you start learning those things when they yell at you,” he said. “You learn to use your weapons, you learn to use your map and compass, you learn to talk on the radio, you learn all those basic skills,” he said.

“Then, finally, having done those two things, that's when you start to develop your medical expertise in the military context,” he said. “That’s when you start to go learn to be a combat medic.”

The general said that from this point forward the military medical Soldier has to learn to wear two hats and speak to both the language of the Army and the language of civilian medicine.

“This means that if you’re a medical staff officer and you're in a command center for a maneuver unit, you're able to understand the graphics that are on the screen,” he said.

“You're able to show what an infantry battalion looks like on a map. You're able to talk about a division boundary between two units and the importance of that division boundary. You can talk about the forward line of troops, you can talk about multi-domain operations.”

It is critical for military medical professionals to have operational fluency, he said.

Then, you work on leader development, he said. “You’re a pretty senior officer in the military or a senior NCO, but how do you become a professional army soldier? That's when you take the next leap from there—that’s when you start to develop a diverse Army and joint skillset.”
Lynn said the next step is to become a master of doctrine.

“Not just a user of doctrine and not just an expert, but you become a master of doctrine and you also have the mandate to become geopolitically informed,” he said. “You need to know what is going on in the world more than you did at the lower levels.”

Lynn: Medical skills are built like Soldier skills

The medical leg of the stool begins at school when you learn what physicians and other medical professionals do, Lynn said.

“Competency, patient advocacy, putting the patient first instead of yourself,” he said. “All those things are part of the culture of medicine, but those things are important in military medicine as well.”

Lynn said medical training works in stages, just as it does with basic Solider skills, and central to medical training is working in a hospital.

“Everything that happens in the hospital, taking histories and physicals, starting IVs, triaging patients, all those kinds of basic skills—once you have those basic skills, you move a little farther up,” he said.

“You hone your diagnostic skills. If you're doing surgery resident, this is when you start learning how to hone your surgical skills,” he said. “In addition to just tying knots, you're actually tying knots in tissue.”

After the medical Soldier achieves a medical competence, it is the time to take on a leadership role, the general said.

“You learn how to do medical administration, you learn how to integrate the fabric of healthcare where you may have electronic health records, all those things that you have to integrate as a medical professional, you start to do, you continue to do at this level and you truly become an expert at this level,” he said.

Lynn: ‘Often you're the last person that a patient sees when they're dying’

The general said the third leg of the stool is soft skills.

“This is one we don't usually address,” he said.

“Talk about compassion,” he said. “Often you're the last person that a patient sees when they're dying or a soldier sees when they're dying on the battlefield, so the compassion that you show to that person is connection and comfort for that person.”

Military medical professionals find themselves in these difficult situations, and often the conversations you have in these situations become spiritual, especially with someone who is diseased, dying or hurt, he said. “If you're treating a patient that's missing part of their body because they've been wounded, showing them the dignity that they're a person and not just a piece of tissue on a stretcher is very important.”

The graduate of the University of Alabama School of Medicine said when they treat patients with compassion and dignity, medical military professionals need to practice servanthood, which is not an obligation upon to those serving in the combat arms.

“It is serving those that are under you rather than putting yourself first—and you very much have that as a soft skill,” he said. “In medicine, you have that ideal of serving the patients that are trusting you for their care.”

The married father of six said servanthood has to be developed. “It doesn't always come naturally for us as people often wear inclined to why cheat or steal--just the way people were built.”

Developing servanthood begins with developing your conscience with empathy, sympathy and respect, he said.

“Nurturing your conscience, knowing the right thing to do in difficult situations, explicitly pursuing commonality and understanding of the patients that you're treating, but also the people you're working with,” he said.

Another soft skill is mentorship, the general. “It’s a very important soft skill that we have. We talk in the U.S. about mentorship a lot.”

Typically in the United States, it involves connecting with someone senior to you, and then having a series of conversations with the senior individual about your career, he said.

“I would make the argument that mentorship is much broader than that, and I like to talk about observational mentorship,” the general said.
“That's where I can learn from the example of the peers around me, the people above me, or even the people that are below me in rank and experience.”

“I think that's something this kind of forum is great for because for the more junior officers, that's something you need to think about,” he said.

Lynn said he has benefited from mentorships wherever he can find them.

“I often learned from Soldiers' things that I thought I knew and I didn't know as well as I thought I did, so to me that's a form of mentorship,” he said.

The general said he learns from the other two two-star commanding generals and his peers at the Army Reserve Medical Department. “I learn from them almost daily and hopefully they’ve learned from me as well.”

Another soft skill, one that makes mentorship and communication possible, is approachability, he said.

“Occasionally, a chief of staff or another senior officer says: ‘Hey Sir, would you mind taking another look at this?’ If I'm not approachable, I'm not going to hear those things,” he said.

“The same thing happens to what you're talking about with your peers,” Lynn said.

“If you're the peer that's not approachable, you're not going to have that other nurse practitioner come up or physician come up and say: ‘Hey, I think you're really kind of being a little harsh here. Soften it up a little bit,’” he said.

“People should do that respectfully and privately and things like that, but you've got to establish communication patterns and patterns of transparency that make those conversations possible.”

Lynn’s keynote address was his third presentation to CIOMR. After his address, he took questions from the audience and met with conference attendees informally there, and later at the formal conference gala CIOMR co-hosted with the Interallied Confederation of Reserve Officers and the Interallied Confederation of Senior Non-Commissioned Officers.

Twenty-two U.S. military personnel attended the CIOMR Mid-Winter Conference, and nine were with the reserve component.

The next CIOMR meeting is the Mid-Summer Congress scheduled July 2 through Aug. 2 in Estonia.

• Date Taken: 02.02.2024
• Date Posted: 02.28.2024 16:26
• Story ID: 464500
• Location: BRU, BE