♬ Chicago, Chicago, my kinda town...♫

At least the town is serving a purpose now....

Navy Medics Get Prepared for Combat—With Tour of Duty in Chicago

CHICAGO— Konrad Poplawski, a 22-year old Navy hospital corpsman, is about to be deployed as a battlefield medic with the 2nd Marine Division, which has served in deadly battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But first, he is making a pit stop at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital, which the Navy says is among few places here in the U.S. that provide experience treating the types of wounds he will inevitably see on the battlefield.

For so long “the first time a corpsman got any trauma experience was when they were deployed, and some would just freeze up,” said Captain Paul Roach, a U.S. Navy surgeon at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center north of Chicago. “We don’t want that to happen anymore,” said Capt. Roach, who heads the program in the Great Lakes region.

The Navy is working to formalize a pilot program that has been tested here for three years, rotating newly enlisted hospital corpsmen—the combat medics for the Navy and Marines—and those needing a refresher while they are back home, for six to eight weeks through Stroger Hospital’s trauma center. The 14-bed unit treats over 6,000 trauma patients yearly, many of them with penetrating, life-threatening wounds akin to those on the battlefield.

Though Chicago is experiencing a sustained drop in murders since a dramatic spike in 2016, it remains a city where a high number of gunshot victims cycle through the trauma center night after night.

About 30% of patients at Stroger Hospital, on Chicago’s near West Side, are admitted to the trauma ward with wounds from firearms, compared with a national average of 4.2% for level 1 trauma centers—hospitals certified to have the resources to handle multiple victims with penetrating and other serious wounds—according to the National Trauma Data Bank.

“The experience here can’t be replicated elsewhere, unless you have a major land invasion,” said Dr. Faran Bokhari, who chairs the trauma & burn surgery unit at the hospital.

In many front-line Marine units, immediate medical care for gunshots, explosions or shrapnel comes from these corpsmen who mostly are young, new to the service and new to seeing up close the wounds they train to treat. The Navy medics, known as hospital corpsmen, typically receive 14 weeks of training in first aid and patient care in Fort Sam Houston in Texas after initial boot camp, and then have the option for additional training. @Muppet
This isn't a big thing.
SOF has trained in urban hospitals for years.
Drudge report is turning into click-bait..
 
Chicago always has a super high level of violence near the Fourth of July. I believe it to be because they give the kids fireworks to have all the shot monitors go off, so they can go and do actual crimes (shootings) without police response because every shot monitor is going off in the entire area. Nothing really new, but then again I am from Chicago so those numbers have stayed the same for the past 5 years, and a common summer weekend number is around 50 shootings. It's also one of the hardest places in the U.S to get a firearm legally, yet the violence has been at this super high rate since I can remember (About 2012). It's kind of sad that those kind of numbers remain the norm out here.
 
Chicago didn't even qualify for the Pizza Box the weekend. 4 out of 50 ?? That is completely unsat. Somebodies squad leader needs to be fired over that kind of performance.
 
Chicago didn't even qualify for the Pizza Box the weekend. 4 out of 50 ?? That is completely unsat. Somebodies squad leader needs to be fired over that kind of performance.

The hood has always maintained a quantity over quality model.

 
One of our trauma surgeons worked at the big trauma center there. He's been here for a while now, but he would say back in his day they would do all the GSE surgery in the ED in a special trauma suite and then ship the patient upstairs to the floor. The turnaround time was incredible. He would say otherwise they could not keep up with the volume.
 
I like NYC, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, DC.... I am meh on LA and Boston. I do not like Chicago or Atlanta. I do everything I can to avoid those cities.
 
I've heard great things about Chicago from people who come from Chicago. I'll take their word for it...but the people I've met from Chicago didn't live in the 'Hood. And that's where the shit goes down.
 
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