Integrating Prolonged Field Care Into Rough Terrain and Mountain Warfare Training: The Mountain Critical Care Course

Current prolonged field care (PFC) training routinely occurs in simulated physical locations that force providers to continue care until evacuation to definitive care, as based on the staged Ruck-Truck-House-Plane model. As PFC-capable teams move further forward into austere environments in support of the fight, they are in physical locations that do not fit this staged model and may require teams to execute their own casualty evacuation through rough terrain. The physical constraints that come specifically with austere, mountainous terrain can challenge PFC providers to initiate resuscitative interventions and challenge their ability to sustain these interventions during lengthy, dismounted movement over unimproved terrain. In this brief report, we describe our experience with a novel training course designed for PFC-capable medical teams to integrate their level of advanced resuscitative care within a mountainous, rough terrain evacuation-training program. Our goals were to identify training gaps for Special Operations Forces medical units tasked to operate in a cold-weather, mountain environment with limited evacuation resources and the challenges related to maintaining PFC interventions during dismounted casualty movement.