NPR’s Quil Lawrence reports that Afghanistan’s Bagram airfield, the primary stop for seriously wounded soldiers before they’re stabilized and transported to Germany or America for long-term care, has served as an opportunity for forging broad advances in emergency medicine.
“At the beginning of this conflict, we were taking the best trauma medicine from the civilian sector, and we brought it to Iraq and Afghanistan,” says U.S. Air Force Col. Chris Benjamin, the hospital commander. He says now his doctors tell him it’s the other way around.
“Here we are seven, eight years later, taking what we’ve learned in these conflicts to teach them the advances that we’ve made with this data collection here in theater,” he says.
Thanks to body armor and advances in battlefield trauma like the increased use of tourniquets, more soldiers are arriving alive, but with serious, traumatic injuries. When they pass through Bagram, the volume and severity of their wounds “continues to yield new data that are helping to save lives in ways that were impossible only a few years ago,” Lawrence writes.
