ARRC Journal 2019 | Page 95

READY FOR TODAY – EVOLVING FOR TOMORROW Members of the Canadian Armed Forces medical team review video of the next stage of training during Operation SIRONA (Canadian contribution to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa) pre-deployment training with their British counterparts at the Army Medical Services Training Centre in Strensall, UK, Dec. 11, 2014.. at the Mozambique floods in 2000 where the military controlled all rotary wing assets, which was the only way of getting aid to isolated communities. If, therefore, ‘Coordinate’ is going to be a challenge, only ‘Cooperation’ is left as the ‘C’ word that we will be able to agree on and make a start on practises and procedures. It will, however, be a start. This is still very early on in this work strand. Early meetings have been very much conversational and will serve to get stakeholders into the same room and build trust. Only then will substantive negotiations be able to begin and develop. While personality should not be a constraint to transform something that needs to be changed, within the civil/military setting, personality is everything. After years of slowly moving towards closer working with the military, a high profile NGO is now moving in the opposite direction following a significant change of personalities in its executive management. with this organisation in Sierra Leone was very fruitful, getting the commercial sector to join in the ARRC Article 5 Outreach Group has not been possible. The reasons are not clear although it has been speculated that outreach and contact groups do not generate contracts and so are seen as low priority activities. Key Considerations • Displaced civilian populations will inevitably seek medical care at deployed military medical treatment facilities. This will have an impact on the operational patient care pathway. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Colonel Jeremy Tuck is an officer with the British Army’s Royal Army Medical Corps and is a consultant in public health medicine and a former general practitioner. He currently serves as the ARRC’s medical director. Col. Tuck has extensive operational experience in clinical delivery, command and staff roles, and has worked at every level from the tactical front line to operational 2- and 3-star level headquarters, as well as on the strategic stage at Ministry and international levels. • MROE will not take precedence over a clinician’s moral and ethical duty to treat all casualties on the basis of need alone. • Most agree that a close civil/military working relationship is not only necessary, but inevitable; to start working on this when the first close battles have started will be too late. While the government and charity sectors have a history of being able to work together, the new arrival of the commercial sector will add a new dynamic. The appearance of the commercial sector during Operation GRITROCK (the Ebola crisis response in Sierra Leone) saw the rapid deployment of a highly capable organisation. However, while the working relationship ALLIED RAPID REACTION CORPS 95