Post-traumatic examination in medical and tactical rescue

The authors have discussed post-traumatic examination with regard to the characteristics of medical rescue and battlefield casualty care. The emphasis has been on the fact that medical rescue workers operate in teams and therefore have a clear-cut distribution of roles and duties. While the task of the team leader is to perform the preliminary patient examination, the other members have to obey the leader’s instructions pertaining to dressing the wounds. The authors proceed to characterising the subsequent phases of post-traumatic examination to be performed by medical rescue workers. Rescuers in tactical combat base their actions on entirely different assumptions. For them, the priority is to achieve the military objective by using the right tactics so they need to perform specific tasks at a specific time. The TCCC guidelines divided patient care in tactical environment into three phases. Furthermore, two procedures for post-traumatic examination on battlefields are distinguished. The article discusses those tactical phases and examination procedures in further detail.