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Maintaining combat readiness

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Dilia DeGrego
  • McGuire Public Affairs
MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, N.J. --  Unlike their typical medical readiness training, members of the 305th Medical Group had an opportunity to train with a disaster medical assistance team directed by United States Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency Aug. 4 through Sunday at the Fort Dix Deployable Medical System Center. 

"This training helped us to better understand what our civilian counterparts do in a time of a disaster and to practice our field skills. It opened our eyes to what they offer us and what we can offer to them," said Tech. Sgt. Milton Blake, 305th Aerospace Medicine Squadron NCO in charge of medical readiness. "We learned a lot from each other. We found a lot of things that work well and a few things we need to work on." 

The New Jersey-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team is a group of professionals committed to providing disaster medical care to the citizens of New Jersey or anywhere within the territories of the United States, when a disaster overwhelms the local health and medical infrastructure, according to its Web site, www.nj1dmat.org. 

The combined groups performed field, casualty movement, field wound management, site selections and shelter set-up training. 

"We (305th MDG readiness) train all the active-duty medics," said Sergeant Blake. "Normally, medical unit readiness training is conducted with only active-duty medics out in field somewhere, and they practice with only Air Force medics." 

After training with the NJ-1DMAT, Sergeant Blake said some improvements the MDG will consider are how its medics communicate with one another and how it manages patient care. 

"Their communication system rocks," he said. "They have their own walkie-talkie system that works among themselves. It really helped the communication flowing. Also, their patients care process was really good. They separated patients by category and things were more organized." 

Sergeant Blake said the 305th MDG would defiantly do this type of training again, especially when it ramps up for the next airshow. 

He said the MDG will make sure they have other squadrons like CE involved in the future. 

Aside from this medical readiness training, members of the 305th MDG also participated in CODE SILVER, an AMC-directed weapons of mass destruction table-top exercise. About 40 people from the 305th MDG, wing agencies and civilian counterparts participated to discuss how each agency would interact during a WMD incident.