Soldiers carried a badly wounded soldier on a stretcher to a field hospital,
where a senior doctor and advanced medical equipment were waiting.
“He
lost his leg in an IED attack. We’re stemming the bleeding and providing him
with an infusion plasma,” a source explained, as the medical staff ran through
the motions.
It was only a drill, carried out by the IDF Medical Corps at
its headquarters in Tzrifin on Wednesday, but the exercise revealed some major
changes washing over the organization as it prepares itself for a multi-front
conflict.
The reforms, many of them informed by improvements in US
military battlefield care, are centered on the placing of top surgeons and
doctors – some of whom head hospital departments in civilian life – together
with medics, and advanced medical equipment, right near the front line of a
battle.
This, the IDF says, will maximize the chances of survival for
badly wounded soldiers, who would otherwise likely die en route to
hospitals.
The idea of replacing evacuations with state-of-the-art
medical treatment on the scene has also seen the IDF become the first military
to offer out-of-hospital plasma transfusions to soldiers suffering from heavy
bleeding.
The drill reflected the fact that the IDF has been facing more
powerful explosives along the Gaza border in recent months.
“We’re seeing
more and more limbs being lost,” the medical corps source said.
Chief
Medical Officer Brig.- Gen. Dr. Yitzhak Kreiss said the new frontline medical
presence would be made up of two levels. “First, there will be a Medical
Company, providing advanced intensive care,” he explained. “The company must be
placed in a forward position.”
Backing up the medical company is a team
of surgeons, who will set up a mobile surgery unit and carry out complex
treatment alongside the intensive care unit.
“They have to be set up
close enough to the battlefield, but not so close that they won’t be able to
work,” Kreiss said.
In the drill, surgeons performed stomach surgery on a
paratrooper who was badly wounded by an explosive attack. “He would not have
lived through an evacuation to hospital,” Kreiss explained.
Going
forward, ordinary combat soldiers will receive a first aid kit complete with
arterial tourniquets to stem bleeding and ballistic glasses to protect eyes from
shrapnel.
“We’re turning the soldiers into combat life-savers,” the
source said.
Unit medics will be equipped with a blood clotting drug, a
finger oxygen monitor measuring both pulse and blood oxygen levels, and dried
plasma packs for transfusion – an improvement on the older salt and water
transfusions carried out in the field.
Medics will also have candies
packed with the powerful anti-pain compound, pentamine.
Serious bleeding
causes some 80 percent of battlefield casualties among cases of preventable
deaths, research has found.
The medical corps is studying the success of
US military medical care, which has managed to bring down the casualty rate
among injured soldiers to single-digit figures. Currently, the IDF loses some
15% of critically injured soldiers, most of them soon after the wounds are
suffered, while the US Army Rangers have brought down their casualty rates to
between 6% and 7%.
“We went to the Americans and asked them, ‘How did you
do this?’” the source said.
The answer helped shape reforms in the
medical corps’ capabilities in the fields of trauma care, tactical medicine
(involving the training of doctors to use radios and deploy to the correct
locations), ballistic protection for soldiers, and evacuations.
The IDF
has recently signed an agreement with the British Army to share information on
treatment of shock injuries, an area in which the UK has made progress due to
its battlefield experience in Afghanistan.
As part of the changes, by
next year, every combat battalion will have its own in-house doctor.