ANP Ambulance Gets Stocked with Medical Kits

Story and photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Eric Lockwood

NTM-A Public Affairs

 

 

 

Members of NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan’s medical advisory team recently retrained on and handed over basic medical bags to Afghan National Police to put into one of their ambulances, in Kabul.

The contents of the bag—officially called an M5 Medical Bag—include bandages, tourniquets, nasal pharyngeal airways, and other basic equipment.

“The bags are mostly set up for combat trauma,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Christopher Colley, a member of the medical advisory team. “[They’re intended] to stabilize a patient to transport them to a higher level of care. There isn’t anything in that bag that is intended to be permanent treatment for an injury.”

It was first aid training, said 1st Lieutenant Abdul Fatah, who is responsible for training and education for 3rd District, ANP Headquarters.  “We refreshed our understanding of what to do in emergency medical situations, like how to treat various wounds or illnesses that will likely arise in the line of duty.”

This handover comes two months after initial training on the contents of the bag. For that initial training, 10 to 12 Afghan medics went through a two-and-a-half hour course that covered each item in the bag. They partnered up and used the equipment on each other, then the instructors put them through different scenarios.

“One of the bandages has a little plastic piece on it that tends to break, like when you pull it too hard because you have adrenaline pumping through you and you’re panicking because your friend is bleeding,” said Colley. The students had to think on their feet, and fast.

The scenarios were meant to simulate real conditions these aspiring medics would very likely encounter, and to get them to think of solutions by themselves to the problems they’d face.

“This training was very useful for the privates,” Fatah added. It greatly improved their knowledge of medical care.

To compare, the level of the training was about on the level of a basic U.S.  Army Combat Live Saver class.

“It’s slightly less because we start at a slightly higher knowledge of, for example, CPR and literacy,” Colley explain. “So for our coalition forces, we’re slightly above the training we give them. But now, they’re at least able to, when they have minor vehicle accidents, or if one of their officers is shot, they can get them to a hospital for treatment, rather than them bleeding out in the street.”

Patients can now receive medical care both once a medic arrives on scene and during transit to the closest hospital. Prior to receiving this medical bag, the ANP ambulance was basically a taxi. It’d get to a scene, pick up a patient, then transport him or her to a hospital. However, the medics could only do so much for the injured person prior to getting picked up, and if the medic didn’t go with that person he or she didn’t get any intermediate treatment.

“Typically,” Colley said, “when things happen here, there’s more than one person who gets hurt. It’s not like a little traffic accident—one car hits another, two people get hurt. It’s—a bomb blows up and there’s 37 people hurt.”

“Now, the doctor can go out there with that ambulance and treat the people that are treatable, get them in the ambulance and get them to a hospital while another ambulance from the hospital is coming.”

These medical bags signal a new chapter in Coalition medical advisory efforts. There are 14 police precincts overall in Kabul, and the goal is for each precinct to have at least one M5 medical bag.

“This was the first precinct. So the plan is one a week now that we’ve got the logistics worked out,” Colley said.

Previously, NTM-A focused mostly on facilities, particularly hospitals such as the ANP Hospital and the National Military Hospital, and also a little bit in the outlying clinics.

“Now,” Colley continued, “we’re going out to the police districts, to the precincts, and training their officers in the field that aren’t assigned medics or doctors and giving them the kind of training we get where the average guy might be the first responder. He’s not going to be a doctor, he’s not going to be a medic. But he can stabilize them and get them able to transport.”

NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan is a coalition of 38 troop-contributing nations charged with assisting the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in generating a capable and sustainable Afghan National Security Force ready to take lead of their country’s security by 2014. For more information about NTM-A, visit www.ntm-a.com.

Tags: Afghan National Police, afghanistan, ANP, education, Feature, featured, independence, Kabul, M5 Medical Bag, medical, nato, nato training mission, NATO Training Mission Afghanistan, NTM-A, police, training

Category: News - Afghan National Police, News - General