How Should Air Force Expeditionary Medical Capabilities Be Expressed?

by Snyder, Don; Chan, Edward W.; Burks, James; Amouzegar, Mahyar A.; Resnick, Adam C.

• ISBN13: 9780833045744
• ISBN10: 0833045741
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-16
• Publisher: RAND Corporation

Summary

This report devises a new metric for measuring Expeditionary Medical Support (EMEDS) and develops a framework for applying it across three Air Force medical mission areas: deployed support to the warfighter, humanitarian relief, and defense support to civil authorities. The operational emphasis of EMEDS is on patient flow. An injured patient receives limited treatment locally and is then moved from the point of injury to an EMEDS facility as quickly as possible. There, the patient is further evaluated, stabilized, triaged, treated, and evacuated to a higher level of care. Each level of care is designed to be sufficient for immediate needs, not to provide definitive care. This emphasis on flow streamlines capabilities that need to be deployed and places the definitive care in the most capable facilities. The current measure of EMEDS capabilities, the number of available beds, is inadequate because the components of the en route expeditionary medical system are not intended to hold patients. The new metric developed in this study focuses on the rate at which each component of the deployment system can evaluate, stabilize, triage and treat, and evacuate patients, or the medical STEP rate. This measure more closely captures the requirement at the time of need and holds the promise of providing a more agile, responsive, and effective medical deployment capability. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. iii
Figures	p. vii
Summary	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Abbreviations	p. xv
Chapter 1	p. 1
Chapter 2	p. 5
The Mission to Support the Warfighter	p. 8
The HUMRO Mission	p. 10
The DSCA Mission	p. 11
Comparing and Contrasting the HUMRO and DSCA Missions	p. 14
Chapter 3	p. 15
General Characteristics of the Mission Areas	p. 15
Supporting the Warfighter	p. 15
The HUMRO and DSCA Missions	p. 15
Common Environmental Elements Across Air Force Medical Missions	p. 17
Patient Influx	p. 17
Patient Outflow	p. 18
A New Paradigm for Deployable Medical Capabilities	p. 20
Observations on the Legacy Measure: Beds	p. 20
A New Measure of Capability: The Medical STEP Rate	p. 22
Using the STEP Rate Concept to Balance Capabilities and Requirements	p. 23
Creating Unit Type Codes to Support Medical STEP Rates	p. 26
Chapter 4	p. 31
Appendix: Current Air Force Medical Deployment Capabilities	p. 33
Bibliography	p. 39
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.