Medics practise life-saving skills
8 Apr 2014 11:50 AM
Royal Navy doctors, nurses and surgeons have
been putting their life-saving skills to the test in a high tempo
exercise.
In
a number of scenarios for Exercise Medical Endeavour, 250 medical personnel in
the primary casualty receiving facility (PCRF) on board Royal Fleet Auxiliary
(RFA) vessel Argus had to treat casualties played by volunteers with specialist
make-up depicting terrible injuries.
Set
to the same standards as any NHS hospital, the PCRF is tested
twice-a-year to ensure their skills and the set-up is fully validated so that
it’s ready to be used in operations around the world.
The
facility ensures that casualties are treated and stable before eventually
moving them to the Queen
Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for longer term
rehabilitation.
Commander Danny Follington, the commanding officer of
the PCRF, said that many lessons in critical battlefield care had been
learnt from Afghanistan and, as a consequence, lives were being
saved:
Deployed hospital care is invested in this vessel. Our
maritime in-transit care team can fly forward, ventilate, resuscitate, give
blood transfusions and bring patients back. It’s one of the lessons we
learned from Afghanistan.
Another is that we now hold 600 units of blood on board
and we have the ability to bleed people on board if necessary; that instant
access to blood supply has been shown to be critical to saving lives and so we
ensure that lesson has been brought to the PCRF as
well.
We
are set up in the same way as any trauma hospital. There are 4 teams that can
do resuscitation, we have 10 intensive care unit beds, 100 ward beds, a full
surgical team, microbiologists, radiologists, nursing teams; all of which work
at either Derriford or Queen
Alexandra hospitals in Plymouth and Portsmouth, directly augmenting
the NHS.
The PCRF also boasts advanced equipment,
including a 64-slice CT scanner, installed during the last refit. Used in
Afghanistan, and also in the NHS, these scanners have been integral to saving
the lives of British servicemen wounded in action.
Consultant radiologist Surgeon Commander Phil Coates,
who has twice deployed to the Camp Bastion hospital, said:
The
imaging side of things is key in major trauma, one of the things we learned
from Afghanistan. We can do 3D reconstruction and if a patient has been hit
with frag we can see the organs which have been hit and ensure they get exactly
the right care. Imaging dictates what happens. It is a fantastic piece of
kit.