re: #924 Gus 802

Emergency general? Try Kings County Hospital in NYC. Whew.

Seriously. In 2003 the army started training reservists there, to prepare them for the kinds of injuries they’d see in Iraq.

The program, called the Academy of Advanced Combat Medicine, started at Kings County two years ago when officers from the 5,300-person Eighth Medical Brigade, based at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, decided to train their reservists in a civilian emergency room. The academy was modeled after a program for active duty medics at the Ryder Trauma Center in Miami.

The Brooklyn hospital proved an ideal partner for the program, the first of its kind in the country for reservists. The hospital’s highly regarded, extremely busy emergency room admits 1,200 major trauma patients each year, among the most in the city. About half of those have penetrating wounds, often stabbings or gunshots, just the kind of wounds a medic might encounter in war, according to Dr. Patricia O’Neill, co-director of the hospital’s division of trauma and critical care.

“The purpose of this program is to get them more facile with real-world trauma,” Dr. O’Neill said, “so when they’re deployed, they’re not scared to death.”

But yeah, I’m sure you can waltz in their with your kid with an ear infection and fever and be seen right away. No problem.
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