Treated to training US dummies in Iraq By Capt Michael Brooke
Edition 1171, July 26, 2007
Smart dummy: WO2 Charlie Tran, Sgt Keith Mason and Cpl Roman Venslavovitch treat a dummy for gunshot wounds. Photo by LS Phillip Cullinan
IF the dummies at the US Army’s Medical Simulation Training Centre at Camp Buehring in the MEAO could speak they would say “mate, thanks for saving my life”.
The “thanks mate” would be for the Australian soldiers who honed their combat first aid skills using the “smart dummies” that breathe and bleed the same as wounded soldiers.
Overwatch Battle Group (West) 3 personnel practised basic life-preserving procedures on 10 computer-controlled dummies that simulated soldiers with gunshot and blast injuries.
Mock blood gushed from the wounds on the dummies until the computers determined that the soldiers had applied the right combat first aid procedures.
Cpl Tamara Siddon, one of two medical orderlies posted with the Force Insertion Training Team to the MEAO, said the valuable training would ensure that wounded Australian soldiers received the medical care they required to keep them alive until being medivaced.
Cpl Siddon, 1HSB, said the challenge was to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could get to a hospital for medical treatment.
“This is why it is so important that the soldiers practise such life-preserving procedures on computer-controlled dummies,” she said.
Cpl Jaid Ackerman, 2HSB, said the dummies, which cost US$40,000 each, took combat first aid to the next level of realism because they breathed and bled like real people.
The computer-controlled dummies allowed soldiers to practise such combat first aid procedures as applying tourniquets and bandages to stop the flow of blood from wounds, he said.
Sig Bruce Calhoun said the dummies challenged him to make judgments about a range of internal and external injuries and how best to treat them.
