AEC is PFC!

Last Updated: January 8, 2025

This is not just another wilderness medical course, though wilderness medical providers would certainly benefit. It’s also not just a different take on TECC, but those who are charged with performing TECC would also greatly gain much from the instruction.

In certain subsets of EMS and Law Enforcement, patient evacuation times are expected to exceed those that are optimal and contribute to patient morbidity and mortality. This 4-day course is for any non-military responder, clinician or provider who may have manage the care of patients in austere and resource limited environments for longer than desired. It is ideal for teams operating in any remote locale where quick medevacs are not readily available such as Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR), Search and Rescue (SAR), Expedition, Arctic, Maritime, Topical, Off-Shore, or even Rural EMS crews who have long transport times due to distance or weather.

The Austere Emergency Care Course is a prolonged field care course based on 10 years of knowledge gained from our original Prolonged Field Care Working Group and Ragged Edge Solutions’ experience and background in training military special operations to operate around the world without traditional medical Support. Over time, and after many inquiries by civilian/non-military clinicians it was realized that the need and demand signal is robust outside of the military. Just like PFC was developed as an adjunct for military medics once they reached the end of Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC,) AEC was created with the civilian provider in mind once they reached the end of Tactical Emergency Casualty Care algorithms. From this Specialized Medical Standards and the Austere Emergency Care Course were born.

Register Today!

There are courses coming up with seats still available!

Course Dates	Event Title	Location	Affiliate	Registration Info
December 2 – 5, 2024	Austere Emergency Care	Horton, Norway	Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue – Academy	Register
December 9 – 12, 2024	Austere Emergency Care	Colorado Springs, CO	Anyone Not Ready	Register
January 6 – 9, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Colorado Springs, CO	Ragged Edge Solutions	Contact
January 9 – 12, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Poland	College of Remote and Offshore Medicine	Sold out! Contact for waiting list.
February 6 – 9, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Gunnison, CO	Anyone Not Ready	Register
March 13 – 16, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Poland	College of Remote and Offshore Medicine	Sold out! Contact for waiting list.
March 17 – 20, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Colorado Springs, CO	Anyone Not Ready	Register
May 22 – 25, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Poland	College of Remote and Offshore Medicine	Sold out! Contact for waiting list.
July 14 – 17, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Colorado Springs, CO	Anyone Not Ready	Register
October 13 – 16, 2025	Austere Emergency Care	Colorado Springs, CO	Anyone Not Ready	Register

What to Expect at an AEC Course:

Courses are be broken up into 2 concurrent tracks: BLS for minimally-trained, non-credentialed first responders, and ALS for credentialed/certified Paramedics, Nurses, PAs, and Doctors who have not had to operate outside of a clinic setting. If your agency/organization wants to host a course and only has ALS level providers, a single track, without BLS/first responders. The first three days are didactic in nature but rely heavily upon interaction between the participants and instructors. There is a heavy emphasis on getting out of your seats to put theory into practice with hands-on skills. With the option to choose electives, participants can intentionally explore those areas that they want to know more about. Classes are not purely canned lectures and with the reliance on participant interaction, instructors work within the protocols, resources, and drugs available to maximize relevance. The last day is a customized culminating exercise that will take place in an environment that matches that of the target operating environment.

More From the SMS website:

Prolonged Field Care

The term prolonged field care was first coined in 2013 by the US Special Operations Forces (SOF) medical providers, following a lead from NATO SOF developers. Prolonged Field Care (PFC) describes a situation where a critical patient needs to be managed in a remote setting (i.e. your “worst day”). The original working group members tapped into the experience of over one hundred providers, representing decades of direct medical support to military forces in some of the most harsh and remote conditions on earth.

With an interest in sharing these best practices with a wider audience, the PFC Working Group, now the Prolonged Field Care Collective, was formed in December 2013, led by Dr. Sean Keenan. In 2014, this group launched the infamous Prolonged Field Care Podcast and website, prolongedfieldcare.org. These two platforms have resources and interviews, which today are downloaded by people in more than 100 countries on a monthly basis.

Military Best Practices

Between the years of 2014 and 2018, active duty US Army Special Forces medical teams from the 10thSpecial Forces Group (SFG) in Colorado, and the 3rd Special Forces Group in North Carolina began developing robust training platforms to prepare small teams to deploy regularly to Africa. The conditions in Africa, characterized by huge distances and harsh conditions, were particularly austere, being resource-limited and logistically challenging. For example, evacuation of patients was routinely challenging, with some being held on small bases for over a day before flying out to a hospital. Many medics required additional knowledge and skills to handle these situations –unlike their previous experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, due to the remote and austere conditions of this problem set, the Mountain Path medical exercise was created, based on the principals of Prolonged Field Care.

Ragged Edge Solutions

The Mountain Path exercise was successful and held up as an example of PFC best practices, but soon proved to be unstainable as a program within the military. Consequently, a privately owned training company was founded to continue the important work of training medics to work within austere conditions. In 2018, the original founder, Roger Dail, combined forces with Special Operations and PFC experts, Sean Keenan, Bill Vasios, and Rich Salve. They founded what is now Ragged Edge Solutions.

Today, Ragged Edge Solutions trains military and government personnel using the Dark+Woods course, derived and designed through best practices from the original Mountain Path program. This course combines classroom instruction with live action scenerios, which immerses students in a hyper-realistic training environment. Known as the gold standard in prolonged field care training, this course is highly sought after by both US and international special operations medics and their teams.

After a few years of running these military trainings, the team at Ragged Edge Solutions learned that there is a strong need for PFC training for civilian emergency medical responders (EMS). In the US alone, 18% of the population is considered to be living in rural areas. Access to hospitals can sometimes be hours, if not days, away from the patient’s home. Because most EMS training focuses on urban environments, many of these EMS professionals are lacking the skills and knowledge to handle emergency situations in remote or austere conditions.

Specialized Medical Standards

With Dr. Sean Keenan at the helm as CEO, Specialized Medical Standards was formed in 2020 as a non-profit company. The mission of SMS is to develop and maintain education and training resources, and our flagship program is a robust curriculum based upon PFC best practices for EMS practitioners. The curriculum for our Austere Emergency Care (AEC) courses is derived from the Ragged Edge Solutions’ Dark+Woods course, utilizing scenarios and educational materials that are directly relevant to a much wider audience of professional prehospital providers.

The AEC Basic Life Support and AEC-Advanced courses, designed as stand-alone robust continuing education (CE) curricula, were validated in 2022 and have since been adopted by a handful of SMS-licensed training partners. We rely on critical care thought leaders, our partners, and course participants to continually enhance the material. Initial feedback also confirms that this is industry-leading medical education and training.

Today, SMS operates with a small team, volunteers, and subject-matter expert contractors. In addition to our Board of Trustees, SMS hosts the International Committee for Austere Emergency Care, an advisory board of medical education leaders who advise the AEC curriculum. Additionally, SMS also directly supports the Prolonged Field Care Collective and the PFC podcast.

Support Us and Drink PFC Coffee!!