Lessons learned from a successful MEDRETE in El Salvador.
Medical readiness education and training exercises are short-term exercises designed to provide health care and preventive medicine education to underserved civilian populations overseas. These high profile missions provide superb training opportunities, build democracies, and can be a powerful incentive to retain soldiers in the Reserves. Despite this, the literature offers little guidance in terms of how to best conduct a MEDRETE, particularly with a unit that has not been recently deployed. A U.S. Army Reserve unit was deployed to El Salvador following two devastating earthquakes and treated 20,890 patients in 10 days. This patient volume was achieved by a close cooperative effort among an experienced Mission Coordinator and Reservists and superb host nation support. Lessons learned regarding predeployment, deployment, patient management, and safety issues are presented to assist future units in conducting successful medical readiness education and training exercises.
339th Combat Support Hospital, 99 Soldiers Lane, Coraopolis, PA 15108-2550, USA.
James C
JC
Post
Manuel E
ME
Melendez
Donna N
DN
Hershey
Abdul
A
Hakim
D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D003906:Developing Countries; D004544:El Salvador; D006801:Humans; D008493:Medical Missions / Q000458:organization & administration; D008887:Military Medicine; D014481:United States