Paramedic/Police

The Washington Post has an interesting story on the development and deployment of "tactical medicine" in some police units.

Teresa Hughes is sure about what saved her life on the winter night in 2004 when her boyfriend shot her in the face: It was the emergency medical care she received from the specially trained team of Maryland State Police officers who broke into her house to rescue her. Falling in and out of consciousness, she heard one trooper say, "Oh my, we're going to get you some help, sweetie, we're going to get you help." He and his colleagues stabilized her and got her to a waiting helicopter that whisked her to the shock trauma center in Baltimore.

The treatment Hughes received that night on the floor of the couple's Taneytown, Md., home is on the front line of emergency medicine and freshly under the spotlight because of the shootings at Virginia Tech. Under traditional emergency medical services (EMS) protocol, medical first responders wait outside a crime scene, or "hot zone," until it is deemed safe by the police. That can take precious minutes or even hours -- and can mean the difference between life and death. But in Hughes's case, the SWAT team included troopers who had been trained as paramedics and were able to give her immediate care, despite fears that her boyfriend might be barricaded inside the house.

Maryland State Police (MSP), along with police in Fairfax and Montgomery counties, the U.S. Park Police and some divisions of the Virginia State Police, are among the agencies that have embraced so-called tactical medicine, embedding paramedics and even physicians into special operations teams in the hope of saving lives, not only in the kind of domestic attack that Hughes suffered but in mass killings and school shootings like last week's rampage at Virginia Tech.

The training is based in large part upon military battlefield training. Even with rapid response helicopter transport, the difference between a live soldier and a dead one may be the team's medic. The same difference also applies to shooting victims and other crime victims.