Medical Sailors assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6), USS Comstock (LSD 45), Fleet Surgical Team (FST) 9 and Naval Medical Center, San Diego participated in the Shipboard Surgical Trauma Training course (S2T2) at the Strategic Operations facility in San Diego, April 5.

S2T2 is a medical training course designed by Capt. Tuan Hoang, Director of S2T2 for Naval Surface Force U.S. Pacific Fleet, with the focus of increasing teamwork by immersing medical Sailors in chaotic trauma scenarios and cooperating with medical Sailors from various commands in a hyper-realistic training scenario.

“The mission of the program is team training,” said Anthony LaPorta, retired Army Colonel, and  professor of surgery and military medicine at Rocky Vista University School of Medicine in Colorado and one of S2T2’s consultants. “It’s to take folks who have been appropriately trained in each of their skills and make them a world class team, a team that can count on each other without thinking.”

S2T2 is a weeklong course that combines traditional training methods with realistically messy and chaotic mass casualty drills, using actors to play victims, controlled explosions, aircraft simulations, training mannequins for injuries and even fake torsos that allowed surgical personnel to perform surgery on realistic internal injuries.

“I think immersion training is absolutely key,” said Hoang. “We hear ‘train as you fight’ but students are not usually immersed into the training as if they were in the battlefield. It’s a lot more difficult for them to imagine the battlefield, but when you throw them into something just short of it then they will be able to use all of their senses and in doing so capture a lot more of the training than they would with just power points and trying to later apply it. Here, you are viscerally absorbing all of the training with your entire team. Now they are experiencing training that emulates real combat with explosions and flight operations. That is the essence of this emersion training.”

LaPorta said the training takes individuals and creates a team that actually has a mission together and makes them better as a group.

 “There’s no comparison at all,” said LaPorta. “We’ve actually statistically measured, that on this course we had a large grant from a joint committee mainly the U.S. Department of Defense, where we were able to prove the resuscitative times, where we bring someone from near death to a survivable status, we’ve been able to cut it from 24 minutes to 13 minutes on the average for all of these teams. That’s taking an already trained team and training them to be a special team. That’s what happens here.”

“This is definitely the most in-depth and hands-on training I’ve received,” said Hospitalman Robert Schuster, a corpsman assigned to Bonhomme Richard. “The trainers here are some of the best in the country. They’re here to share their knowledge and their experiences, what they’ve seen done wrong and what they’ve seen done right, so they can pass the torch to us and help us save lives.”

Schuster said he attributes the team’s improvement to the long hours spent together in the controlled chaos of S2T2.  .

“Being here for 12 to 13 hours a day training together,” said Schuster. “constantly communicating and working with each other to achieve our desired outcome for our patients. Our teamwork has increased, we’re more comfortable working with each other, we’re not yelling and screaming, we’re focused on our assigned positions and calmly treating our patients. It’s a flow we’ve achieved with each other. I think every corpsman from every command should do some kind of training like this and this training should be projected throughout the Navy.”

The importance of cooperation in a mass casualty situation cannot be overstated, and S2T2 is able to improve effective cooperation increasing battlefield survivability, said LaPorta.

“It’s an increasing magnitude of improvement in ability to save lives,” said LaPorta. “No one of us can do enough things to interact with a patient in the periods of time we need to save someone with a massive injury that includes significant bleeding and/or airway control. For years and years we talked about the golden hour, how if we got someone to a hospital or a forward surgical team within that hour, we would distinctly improve their odds of survival. That’s true, there’s no question about it, but it’s more true that if we get there even quicker, especially for a person who may have a massive hemorrhage or airway obstruction, it’s minutes that matter. Four minutes is all it takes for a major artery to bleed out and we’re trying to get our trainees to a point where they can effectively make that difference. I believe any team of surgical or resuscitative retention should take this course, because when worst comes to worst, they need to be able to act as one team.”

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