Medical team performs extraordinary feat and brings home ‘unexpected survivors’
Nominated category: Deployed Healthcare Award
Helping to save lives is what all medical professionals aim to achieve. However, if that’s operating on an injured soldier in the back of a Chinook helicopter, flying over enemy territory at night where visibility is poor and with temperatures as low as -9°C, then this type of situation calls for a team of extraordinary medical professionals.
The Medical Emergency Response Team which won last year’s Deployed Healthcare Award were in such positions on numerous occasions and was made up of a team of a variety of practitioners from both the military and civilian medical field, where their teamwork and skills were pushed to the limits and helped to save many a soldier who became known as ‘unexpected survivors’.
Teamwork was very much at the heart of the team’s success which was based on mutual respect for each team member’s area of expertise, which was established through a number of induction and familiarisation programmes. The team of senior doctors, RAF Emergency flight nurses and paramedics and Army Combat Medical Technicians provided advanced resuscitation and pre-hospital critical care to soldiers, from close to the point of wounding and in a dedicated Chinook helicopter.
An example of this occurred on Christmas Eve, when the Medical Emergency Response Team, based at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, responded to a mine-strike with two casualties. One had severe injuries – amputation to both legs and one arm – with no obvious route for vascular access. Lapsing into unconsciousness as he was carried on to the Chinook the medical team managed to stabilise the soldier where he arrived in the emergency department conscious, pain free and talking, and was fit to be taken to theatre within 20 minutes.
Using damage control resuscitation, novel vascular access techniques and critical care interventions, the team stabilised the casualties, delivering them rapidly to the emergency department. The Medical Emergency Response Team has evolved progressively since it was established in 2006, forming an essential part of the combat casualty care pathway from point of wounding to UK hospital. This team has advanced the concept, both with further developing Intelligent Tasking, and with the use of iliac crest intraosseous vascular access.