The Prolonged Field Care(PFC) Working Group has been working hand in hand with the Joint Trauma System (JTS) for almost a year in writing and editing new guidelines for medics and providers who may have to take care of casualties for longer than normal planning guidelines in resource constrained environments. This could be a few hours or many days.
Recently debuted in the FAll 2016 edition of the Journal of Special Operations Medicine, this Clinical Practice Guideline(CPG) was written to address crush injury and associated complications that a provider could expect to face when taking care of a patient in an austere environment by himself or with a small team. As stated in our podcasts on this subject(below), this is an interesting surrogate injury to start with because of all the applications in related issues such as tourniquet conversion, rhabdomyolysis, hyperkalemia, compartment syndrome, etc.
This will remain posted here as an official recommendation as well as on the JTS CPG Website (soon) along with the other 55 CPGs written for all military providers. We have now published Burn, Analgesia and wound care with more of these Prehospital/Role 1 Guidelines already written and being edited. There are also plans in infancy for more including Austere Resuscitation and Sepsis Recognition and Treatment, Airway, TBI, Documentation and Telemedicine. Any volunteers???
The beauty of a stand-alone CPG is that it can be individually edited or replaced as needed apart from other guidelines without having to republish, print and buy a whole new book, therefore we do not offer a hard-copy version for sale as you can print these out for your self in any size you need. The PDF will remain free and open source, but be sure to print them out prior to your deployment in the case that you don’t have a fast reliable internet source in-country. I know many Docs who keep all of them printed out in a deployment binder at hand to reference or study.
Crush Injury In Prolonged Field Care Clinical Practice Guideline Oct 2016
Video Podcast: Crush Syndrome From a Prolonged Field Care Perspective
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