Readiness is the cornerstone of army effectiveness. It is the principal line of attempt for the Department of Defense. For 24 college students in the Uniformed Services University (USU) Dive Medicine and Rescue route, readiness is the ability to perform complex medical obligations, even overcoming emotional fears and stress, in an aquatic place. “The military clinical providers have to understand conventional medication, but also how to take the one’s capabilities and use them inside the austere surroundings,” stated Dr. Matthew Welder, USU Assistant Professor and Course Director. “The austere environment can become the provider’s primary enemy. Therefore, they must educate for scientific, operational, bodily, and emotional readiness to ensure they’re a practical member of the Ready Medical Force.”
The two-week direction, conducted at the Special Forces Underwater Operations School in Key West, Florida, combines a mixture of almost 90 hours of a study room, pool, and open water schooling designed to provide the scholars with a full understanding of the medical problems and responses associated with army water operations. This onsite training includes the fundamental scuba, nitrox, superior, dive strain, and rescue eLearning modules that must be completed before arriving on the route. Starting with a simple swim assessment, the path culminates with the utility in their abilities through a complex high-perspective rescue onto a US Coast Guard Cutter.
“Unique to this path is all the didactic lectures college students receive at the scientific problems that could result from diving errors,” said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Michael Arnett, Resident, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Arnett, who’s one of the course teachers, feels that the greatest mission in educating is attending to the scholars to end counting on their primal instincts, which do not put together them for diving or underwater operations and get them to pay attention to the instructors about what they should be doing while underwater.
“Because of the big instructor: pupil ratio, it is straightforward to look at which college students fast incorporate the remarks of their teachers and which of them do no longer,” said Arnett. “As a senior scientific educator, my enjoy suggests that the scholars who quickly comprise comments and exchange conduct within the diving surroundings could showcase equal behavior within the clinical setting. Conversely, college students who appear to have difficulty incorporating or ignoring feedback on improving their diving strategies would additionally show off that equal behavior in the medical setting.”
The schooling is designed to introduce the students to a spread of complex and excessive diving and rescue situations requiring them to use the abilities discovered to succeed. They are taught the dive scientific ideas through schoolroom lectures, through expert instructors of their fields, then apply and best those principles and strategies in the restricted water putting, earlier than getting into the open water for the very last opinions. “The boom of those students is exponential through the quiet of the course,” delivered Welder. “They can perform gross and fine motor ability responsibilities below stress in a surrounding trying to kill them.”
Welder notes that the student’s finest undertaking is overcoming emotional fear while maintaining their and concurrently performing complex clinical obligations in the course of affairs based totally simulation. The teachers aren’t the best ones who see the increase; the students, starting from scientific personnel assigned to USU, the FBI, NASA, and US Army Ranger gadgets, recognized the multiplied know-how, skills, and ability gained for the duration of the route.
“I received a massive quantity of self-assurance in my talents to rescue and deal with diving casualties,” said Navy Student Nurse Anesthetist Lieutenant Jeffrey D. Henderson. “I recognized the price of being capable of getting out of my head, avoiding panic, and using drills to benefit the manipulation of chaotic situations.” Additionally, Henderson brought up that the course furnished a lifelong reminiscence of using valuable gas legal guidelines and diving complications, which constructed self-assurance in treating associated diving casualties. “I visually noticed how Boyle’s regulation applies to fuel intake for the duration of our deeper dives, which I will not forget permanently,” said Henderson.
