Army taps Harborview to help train combat trauma teams
The hospital's Level I trauma center is 1 of 7 selected nationwide to expose military responders to gold-standard skills.
Harborview Medical Center is one of seven elite Level I trauma centers nationwide that will partner with the U.S. Army to train trauma teams to care for soldiers injured in combat.
“Military-civilian partnerships help sustain the skills that saves soldiers’ lives,” said Dr. Eileen Bulger, chief of trauma at Harborview Medical Center and professor of surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “This builds on our longstanding partnership with Madigan Army Medical Center for residency and medic training.”
The training program, formally called the Army Medical Department Military-Civilian Trauma Team Training Program, will assign medical personnel serving on the 250th Forward Resuscitative Surgical Team to Harborview for up to three years.
Some personnel will be embedded and work full-time at Harborview and others will rotate in periodically. The goal is to ensure the Army’s continued readiness to apply gold-standard medical responses to battlefield casualties.
“The partnership with Harborview is critical to ensuring that our medical personnel maintain a high level of clinical proficiency and are ready to deploy,” said Cynthia Barrigan, director of military-civilian partnerships at the Army Surgeon General’s Office. “At Harborview, they will have an opportunity to care for a wide range of trauma and critically ill patients they would not routinely encounter in our military treatment facilities.”
Maj. Alex Malloy, a trauma surgeon, and Col. Scott Young, an emergency medicine physician, recently started their assignments at Harborview. The hospital staffs Washington state’s only Level I trauma center, certified to provide the most comprehensive care for major injuries.
Malloy, Young and their military colleagues will focus on building surgical and other skills crucial to lifesaving care.
Trauma programs at seven U.S. academic medical centers were selected for their expertise in treating high volumes of patients with acute injuries and critical illness:
- University of North Carolina
- Cooper University Hospital (NJ)
- Oregon Health Sciences University
- Medical College of Wisconsin
- Vanderbilt University (TN)
- University of Chicago
Media invited to signing ceremony Aug. 12
Members of the media are invited to a signing ceremony to formally recognize this partnership. It will begin at 10 a.m. on Aug. 12, 2021, at Harborview Medical Center’s View Park plaza (west side of hospital). Expected attendees include leaders from Harborview and UW Medicine, the soldiers in training, the Army Deputy Surgeon General, representatives from the Surgeon General’s Office, 1st Corps Surgeon and 62nd Medical Brigade Commander and team, the Forces Command Surgeon and the hospital commander from Madigan Army Medical Center.
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