Surgical team preps to deploy with weekend in Miami

  • Published
  • By Army Staff Sgt. Jason Epperson
  • 2d Engineer Brigade Public Affairs
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  The 8th Forward Surgical Team (Airborne), based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, is heading to Miami.

That might sound like a vacation to most of us, but unless your idea of the perfect getaway involves working 48 straight hours in a busy hospital trauma unit, it's clearly not.
The 8th FST, one of the 17th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion's units, is preparing to deploy in the next few months.

In preparation, the unit is training under intense and challenging conditions.
One of these challenges is training at the Army Trauma Training Center in Miami, Fla., in mid-October.

Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Gritta, the company first sergeant, eagerly discussed the opportunities for training there.

"The Miami trip is for us to actually practice or actually serve as a team for trauma patients," Gritta said. "We'll go down to Jackson Memorial Hospital, Ryder Trauma Center, down in Miami. It's a university hospital and they not only have their own medical school, but they allow Army units, typically FSTs, and some special operations teams to go in and actually manage trauma patients."

"We will have patients that we will operate on as well," Gritta said. "Because of the percentage of traumas that they get and the type of injuries they get, that's a great training ground - if you think about it - on home soil. It allows us to perfect our skills and our techniques there on real casualties or real patients that need help, so it's a great teaching platform as well as great platform to hone our skills."

"It gets us up to speed on some of the newest or latest trauma techniques or (operating room) techniques," he said. "It allows us to actually work as a team prior to going into a combat environment on real casualties or real patients."

"(The) first four days, we will actually get an orientation of the hospital and review of all the codes of everything we will need to know for the hospital system for the campus and then we'll go into a little bit of trauma process review and any new updates on trauma process and then we'll go into a mass casualty exercise that will get thrown at us and from there we'll actually work on patients from inside the (Trauma Resuscitation Unit) and we'll work within the hospital campus at the trauma center for the rest of the two weeks we'll be down there."

"We'll have what's called a capstone event and we will see patients non-stop for 48 hours, so we'll be pretty much be working morning, noon and night for those two days, seeing trauma patients."

"There's no break time or nothing. It's 48 hours of non-stop seeing patients, and then we get on a bird and come home."