PFC Sponsored by SOMA

The Special Operations Medical Association (SOMA) was founded in 1992.   It now consists of hundreds of members in pre-hospital, tactical, wilderness, austere, disaster and deployed medicine.  The primary goal of the association is to advance the art and science of special operations medical care through the education and professional development of special operations medical providers. This is where the Prolonged Field Care Working Group and our website come into play.

All of the work you see on our site and in our recommendations has come from our own money and volunteer hours in our spare time.  Current and past working group websites have been paid for by my own money in an effort to get the the right information out to the guys who need it.  SOMA has closely collaborated with the working group ever since COL Mabry challenged COL Keenan to do something about the problems and questions we we raised about far-forward, austere medical care facing our medics.  We took that challenge not knowing how time consuming and resource intensive this undertaking would be.  It is worth every minute and every penny when we hear the impact we have on the way medics train, prepare and deploy to the far reaches of the globe.  While SOMA has always maintained the www.libsyn.com site that hosts the PFC podcast they are now proud to directly sponsor http://www.ProlongedFieldCare.org in an effort to provide vitally needed educational content to medics around the world.

If you are a SOMA member we thank you for your support.  If you are not, I urge you to go to www.specialoperationsmedicine.org and sign up.  As part of your membership you will receive a subscription to the Journal of Special Operations Medicine (JSOM) which is an official publication of SOMA.  Our working group has a dedicated section in the JSOM reserved for articles recommendations and case studies pertaining to prolonged field care.  As you can see we’ve long been intertwined, we’re just now making it official.

Each year our presence at the Special Operations Medical and Scientific Assembly has grown and this year was our biggest yet.  We put on an entire day of labs, discussions, lectures and panels in a closed pre-conference session.  It was closed in order to limit the audience to active duty medics and their Battalion Surgeons and PAs.  In actuality it was completely packed and standing room only.  For those of you who couldn’t make it to Charlotte SOMA sponsored our session by providing a camera crew who recorded almost all of the presentations that day.  I now have the hard drive in my possession and am going through the footage in order to release everything I can right here on our site for medics around the world.

The next SOMSA meeting will be on 22 May 2017.  If you want to attend and you are a medic, do what you can to take an interest now and get involved in advancing your practice.  SOMA is always looking for presenters and the medic vignettes are almost always the most anticipated and well received.

Let us know if this partnership is serving you well.

-Paul