Today, Rep. Joseph Heck (R-NV), Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, made the following remarks on the hearing titled "Ensuring Future Medical Readiness." To view testimony for today's hearing click here.
"I want to welcome everyone to this hearing of the Military Personnel Subcommittee to receive views on how best to ensure future military medical readiness.
This hearing is a part of the committee’s on-going project to comprehensively review the current state of the Military Health System and military healthcare, and based on this information, identify areas that need improvement.
Our purpose today is to discuss the top priority of the military health system—to ensure the medical readiness of our military forces, while also ensuring a ready medical force, prepared to deploy in support of our combat troops.
Over the past 14 years of conflict, the Services have worked tirelessly to improve medical readiness, ensuring both service members and medical providers are able to deploy and accomplish their combat missions. The medical readiness rates for each of the Services have seen double-digit growth, as commanders and healthcare providers work together to identify and eliminate barriers to deployability.
Combat medicine has also seen extraordinary advances, resulting in service member survival rates that were once thought unachievable. In many areas, the standards of care have been redefined, as advances in areas ranging from transfusion medicine to casualty transport care reshape combat medicine. These crucial advances have not only benefitted the military, but civilian medicine as well.
Many of these advances were made possible by the tireless efforts of military practitioners. Even in peacetime, military healthcare providers have the complex job of maintaining the medical readiness of service members at home stations, while also manning, equipping and deploying medical units with medical personnel who are trained in both military skills and specialized medical skills needed for wartime medicine.
The hard-fought advances in combat care over the past 14 years must be preserved. The medical specialties needed during war are not limited to trauma. However, during periods of limited deployment, trauma skills can quickly degrade, which is why we must do everything possible to maintain proficiency in both trauma and emergency medicine. It is crucial that military trauma teams have the proper patient volume and case complexity during times of limited deployment so that they can maintain the skills needed in combat.
We will hear today from two panels—the first panel, consisting of the Joint Staff Surgeon and Service Deputy Surgeons General, who can provide valuable insights regarding Service-wide initiatives; and the second panel, comprised of practitioners, who can provide perspectives on the current challenges facing military emergency medicine and trauma practitioners. I look forward to hearing from our panels about the current efforts underway by the Services to ensure we maintain high service member readiness, and provider readiness, during periods of limited deployment. In addition, I am interested to hear how the Services ensure medical providers maintain their specialties, particularly in areas where patient volume is limited. Finally, I look forward to hearing the challenges facing practitioners as they look for innovative ways to maintain proficiency during periods of limited deployment.
We are joined again today by two outstanding panels.
Let me welcome our first panel:
Major General Joseph (Joe) Caravalho
Joint Staff Surgeon
Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Major General Dorothy Hogg
Deputy Surgeon General
United States Air Force
Rear Admiral Terry Moulton
Deputy Surgeon General
United States Navy
Brigadier General Robert Tenhet
Deputy Surgeon General
United States Army
SECOND PANEL
I would now like to welcome our second distinguished panel this morning:
Colonel Linda Lawrence
Special Assistant to the Air Force Surgeon General for Trusted Care Transformation
Office of the Air Force Surgeon General
Lieutenant Colonel (Promotable) Robert Mabry
Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow
U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Claude D’Alleyrand
Chief, Orthopaedic Traumatology Service
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center"
