WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. -- While customers see day-to-day clinical operations at the 509th Medical Group at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, they may not see what the medical group is doing during its training days.
Airmen in the 509th MDG conduct training days once a month to enhance their skills and knowledge and to prepare and to be ready to assist customers and respond to threats.
“Installations must be prepared for a wide range of threats and hazards with medical response teams trained and ready to respond.” said Kira Lampton, 509th Medical Group, medical readiness manager.
Each month the medical group focuses on a different area for training.
Last month focused mostly on home station response training. If the base experiences a disaster, the medical group may have to break up into teams; this practice helps them prepare to do that.
“The training tests capabilities and plans, to ensure it’s not only robust enough to support a wide range of disasters, but it is realistic and would hold up with new challenges and constraints that could be encountered,” said Colonel Sandra Nestor, 509th Medical Group commander.
Different sections practice tasks such as inventorying and providing supplies to the rest of the medical group, practicing techniques for hemorrhage control, and decontamination procedures.
“Ideally, the training consists of a lot of hands-on training, so they’re getting the movement and muscle memory on how to do something versus sitting in front of a computer and doing computer based training,” said Nestor.
Airman 1st Class Sabrina Strover, 509th Medical Group dental assistant said she feels better prepared after the training days, because she learns better from hands-on training than from computer-based training.
After the training concludes, a review is done to let everyone know what was accomplished.
“I expect that it’s going to be very effective throughout the course of the year because people have this dedicated time to get after readiness,” Nestor said. “This dedicated time allows us at the medical group to train on responses for deployments or home station response.”
These monthly training days help keep the 509th Medical Group ready to respond and support all missions at Whiteman AFB.