FORT HUNTER LIGGETT, California – Lt. Gen. Nadja West, U.S. Army Surgeon General and U.S. Army Medical Command Commanding General and many other distinguished visitors, met at Fort Hunter Liggett to tour the 528th Hospital Center, Sept. 6, 2018.
These senior medical professionals traveled to a region primarily known for its agriculture – not for leisure, but to speak to the leadership overseeing the exercise, tour a moulage facilitate and to walk-through the field hospital to get an on-ground perspective of how a medical exercise of this scale and scope can increase overall readiness for the Armed Forces.
“The medical component of an exercise like this is extremely important to readiness, because our Soldiers, and in our case we support the entire joint force; Sailors, Airmen and Marines, need to know, that if they get ill or injured doing what their nation asked them to do, they have the absolute best medical care available,” West explained.
Using the Professional Filler system to assist in expanding capabilities, approximately 100 medical professional from 15 installations across the United States deployed to California to support the 528th Hospital Center’s Medical Exercise and to validate their ability to operate the field hospital as a cohesive team.
After several briefs, receiving an artificial face and hand injury and speaking to numerous medial Soldiers, West took a moment to highlight the importance of activating PROFIS Soldiers for the MEDEX and how these embedded capabilities effectively transitions to real-world situations.
“The field hospital has the capabilities to provide the care needed in an operational environment,” said West. “That’s why they were developed and it’s important that we exercise them like we have during this exercise. With all of our occupational specialist, our physicians, our physician assistant, our nurses, our microbiologist etc.…We have a whole suite of capabilities our here that some people don’t think about, to ensure that we’re training on life-saving procedures.”
This integrated team of medical Soldiers encountered a variety of simulated, multifaceted and stressful training scenarios that tested their knowledge and operating procedures. The collection of the lesson learned from the Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise portion to each simulated casualty inject, will be used to shape doctrine for future operations.
“We’re taking the lessons learned from multiple stages of this exercise,” said Col. Paul Johnson, a chief nurse assigned to the 115th Combat Support Hospital. “The first part was the activation of the unit and the unit going through the EDRE. Once we got ‘boots on ground’ we evaluated how long it would take before the hospital could receive patients, how long does it take to get from that initial entry to the next level of development and then how long it would take to develop the final 148-bed facility.”
“The number of observations and the lesson learned that we’re gathering is phenomenal,” Johnson added.
From day one the U.S. Surgeon General envisioned MEDCOM as a premier and expeditionary component for combatant commanders. As West and the other distinguished visitors observed each level of the field hospital, it was a “dream come true,” said West.