ALI AL SALEM AIR BASE, Kuwait -- The 386th Expeditionary Medical Group hosted a joint coalition tactical combat casualty care all service members course at the base theater May 29, 2022.
TCCC-ASM is a 7-hour course for all service members. TCCC was designed to lessen combat deaths by providing trauma stabilization techniques for the wounded to survive long enough to receive life-saving treatment at a medical facility.
“There's only so many medical professionals within the med group at any one given time,” said 1st Lt. Nicholas Palczer, clinical nurse, 386th EMDG. “We want to be able to expand everybody's capabilities across the base, so when [an incident] does happen, now everybody across the base or area of responsibility can get that intervention started.”
In the TCCC course, which replaced the self-aid buddy care course, U.S. service members and coalition partners learned how to use hemostatic gauze when packing wounds and practiced applying a combat action tourniquet, wrapping a bandage and opening the airway by using the head tilt/chin-lift or jaw thrust maneuver.
“It's kind of a new concept–care under fire–in terms of providing medical care,” said Master Sgt. Harmony Alley, medical technician, 386th EMDG. “Basically, you want to apply a tourniquet high and tight and get out versus before, we would do patient care in the middle of the fight. So that concept has changed because people were getting injured trying to rescue people on scene versus pulling them out and then doing the care from there.”
Members from the 386th EMDG taught the TCCC using a crawl, walk, run approach. In the morning, lectures from slides were presented on a screen in the base theater, followed by step-by-step hands-on training. The course concluded in the afternoon with trainees applying what they learned with real people simulating having trouble breathing and massive bleeding.
“Some of the trainings outside included mass hemorrhaging and clearing someone's airway,” said Alley. “Individuals had to run out there and apply tourniquets, pressure bandages, apply pressure, open a patient's airway, and evacuate them.”
TCCC-ASM instructional videos and training resources can be found here: https://deployedmedicine.com/market/171
“If you're in uniform, out of uniform, on duty, off duty, a car wreck, or in a combat zone, you can use these skills in all of those scenarios,” said Palczer. “It translates into the civilian world, too. There's no negative to teaching more people how to start that initial intervention of care.”