Building a Mississippi Military-Civilian Surgical Partnership for Readiness and Community Service

Area of Science:

• Surgical readiness and military-civilian partnerships.
• Trauma care and expeditionary combat casualty management.

Background:

• Military surgical readiness for combat casualty care increasingly relies on civilian partnerships.
• Limited case volume at military facilities necessitates access to civilian clinical environments.
• Keesler Medical Center (KMC) general surgeons trained at Memorial Hospital (MH), a civilian Level 2 trauma center.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of integrating military surgeons into a civilian trauma service on surgical readiness.
• To analyze surgical case exposure and trauma patterns within a military-civilian partnership.

Main Methods:

• Comparison of non-elective general surgery cases between MH and KMC in 2025.
• Analysis of trauma activation data, including day-of-week patterns and high-acuity trauma indicators (blood product administration).
• Statistical evaluation using chi-square goodness-of-fit and Fisher's exact tests.

Main Results:

• MH provided significantly greater non-elective surgical exposure per weekend call than KMC (P < .001).
• Trauma activations showed a statistically significant uneven distribution across the week (P = .030), peaking mid- to late-week.
• High-acuity trauma exhibited a similar late-week trend, though not statistically significant.

Conclusions:

• Integrating military surgeons into civilian trauma centers significantly boosted exposure to non-elective and high-acuity surgical care.
• This collaboration supported community trauma coverage while enhancing military surgical readiness.
• Surgical readiness is influenced by case volume, exposure density, and temporal patterns, supporting strategic military-civilian partnerships.