Reserve medical squadrons amp up training efforts

by Senior Airman Madelyn McCullough
446th Airlift Wing Public Affairs

12/10/2013 - MCCHORD FIELD, Wash. -- Citizen Airmen of the 446th Aeromedical Staging and Aeromedical Evacuation Squadrons play on different sides of the same coin when they're deployed in the field. While their roles may go hand-in-hand, they've seldom had the opportunity to train together--until today.

Leadership from the squadron joined forces and built a training program, which allows them to work side-by-side, as they would in a deployed environment--and also allow them to smooth out any potential issues, which may come up.

Dec. 8, they executed the training plan for only second time during the Reserve weekend.

"This is actually just fitting two pieces of the puzzle together," said Lt. Col John Olmedo, 446th AES operations flight commander. "ASTS has their role in terms of taking the patients, AE has their role is to move the patients. We just have not connected the two."
Olmedo and Senior Master Sgt. Jonathan Lapham, 446th ASTS operations flight superintendent were at the core of the program.

"It's trying to keep us in line with the real world," said Senior Master Sgt. Jonathan Lapham, said. "We would, if we were to deploy or if there was a contingency happening, be working hand in hand with AE so we want to actually be able to train that way."

The two squadrons do this by practicing the procedures on one of McChord's C-17 Globemaster III aircraft.

"We're running this as if we were running an actual contingency aeromedical staging facility," Lapham said. "We're staging our patients that have come in from wherever for flight with the air evac squadron. We'll then take these patients out to the aircraft, load them on the aircraft and then AE will take over and fly them on the mission out. Theoretically speaking if we were in theater, our facilities here will have collected these patients we now put them on the aircraft. They're flying them to lahndstuhl Germany, then we'll sort of reverse when they're flight comes back. We'll be on the lahdstuhl side."

The goal is to make the circumstances as close as possible to situations they'd face in the real world, and to maximize the quality of training the Reservists receive.

"There's a number of folks who have not deployed," Olmedo said. "They train to do it, but they don't actually do it. Some of our folks haven't deployed in a while, some of our folks have so the folks who have can train the folks who haven't. It's a good way to keep the sword sharpened."

Reservists will be given the opportunity to really learn things they have only been able to touch on in the past.

"The goal here was not to make it an exercise so to speak because we didn't want that, we didn't want to be encumbered by that," Olmedo said. "This is where people will make the mistakes. We'd rather have them learn and make mistakes here then when it's a real patient."

"You can train in a skills lab or a classroom, you can even do a little bit of hands on, but when you actually get out there and you're working with the aircraft and with that live crew -- that steps it up 100 times," Lapham said. "It boosts morale and you actually get that training. You gain muscle memory as my commander likes to say."

With this training, they will have better communication, they'll be able to compensate and perfect procedures, and they get that opportunity to figure out where their shortfalls are, Laphman said. It's a way to figure out what mistakes they've made and correct them now as opposed to in theater, in a contingency, or in a disaster situation. They'll be at that 100%.

"Realistically this is a low hanging fruit that we haven't taken advantage of in my eyes," Olmedo said. "We have an AMDS here on the base, we have an ASTS, and we have AES. We have every squadron that you would deploy with. But we haven't trained together."

And now that they are training together, the squadrons plan to add it to their normal every UTA training schedules, while still continuously improving procedures to make them as realistic as possible.