BMJ  2008;336:1098-1100 (17 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.39568.496424.94

Feature

Emergency Medicine

Lessons from the battlefield

¹ London

Last month the UK government announced it wanted non-military doctors to work in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anne Gulland investigates what they might learn

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

War is a very efficient schoolmaster, said an unnamed US surgeon general quoted in historian Roger Cooter’s study on the effects of war on medicine.¹ That phrase could have been uttered by Colonel Tim Hodgetts, defence consultant adviser in emergency medicine and honorary professor of emergency medicine at Birmingham University. He has been nurturing the specialty of emergency medicine since its introduction to the armed forces in Kosovo in 1999.

Emergency medicine’s importance and influence has risen exponentially since then, says Colonel Hodgetts. So much so that: "In terms of managing serious injury we are several steps ahead of what the NHS does."

First class care

A solider injured in Afghanistan or Iraq will get treatment that a pedestrian knocked down by a car on a high street in the United Kingdom could only dream of. To start with, he will be surrounded by soldiers who are trained and tested in first aid . . . [Full text of this article]

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