title: Tactical Combat Casualty Care: Beginnings.
abstract: Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) is a set of evidence-based, best-practice prehospital trauma care guidelines customized for use on the battlefield. The origins of TCCC were nontraditional. The TCCC program began as a Naval Special Warfare biomedical research effort launched after the realization that extremity hemorrhage, a leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield, was not being treated with a readily available and highly effective intervention: the tourniquet. This insight prompted a systematic reevaluation of all aspects of battlefield trauma care that was conducted from 1993 to 1996 as a joint effort by special operations medical personnel and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. The product of that 3-year research project was TCCC, the first-ever set of battlefield trauma care guidelines designed to combine good medicine with good small-unit tactics.
authors.affiliation: Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care, Joint Trauma System, US Army Institute of Surgical Research, San Antonio, TX. Electronic address: Fkb064@yahoo.com.
authors.forename: Frank K
authors.initials: FK
authors.lastname: Butler
mesh_terms: D004635:Emergency Medicine / Q000266:history / Q000379:methods; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008887:Military Medicine / Q000266:history* / Q000379:methods; D014481:United States; D055813:Wilderness Medicine / Q000266:history* / Q000379:methods
keywords: TCCC; Tactical Combat Casualty Care; battlefield trauma care; tactical medicine