Introduction to the 5th focus-on issue devoted to disaster and military surgery

Excerpt

The fifth Focus-On Issue devoted to Disaster and Military Surgery in this journal is dedicated to several different fields within this topic. The first two papers deal with educational and training issues. One of them describes current challenges in the training of military surgeons, and reports the experience from Dutch combat operations in Afghanistan [ 1]. The surgical workload is compared to that of the surgical residents and the pre-deployment medical specialist program. Their findings are interesting, and the authors call into question the current civilian resident training, which is far away from the competencies of a fully trained military surgeon. They recommend the recognition of military surgery as a subspecialty within general (trauma) surgery in the Netherlands, and also the introduction of a NATO Military (and Disaster) surgery standard. …