Military medicine
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Comparative Study
Combat trauma life support training versus the original advanced trauma life support course: the impact of enhanced curriculum on final student scores.
Within a military framework, the trauma course student, a young medical officer, is trained to become a trauma team leader and the first provider of medical aid. By adding battlefield medicine-related subjects to the basic Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) course, as well as exercises tailored to the distinctive demands of military medicine, we could develop a special teaching unit: Combat Trauma Life Support (CTLS). The curriculum is basically the complete unchanged ATLS course of the American College of Surgeons enriched with lectures and practicums to fill the gap between the essentially civilian emergency department character of the ATLS course and the military tasks of the medical officer. ⋯ We conclude that the CTLS comprehensive curriculum provides an improved training basis for the complex task of army battlefield trauma care support.