• Battlefield surgeons must be well trained at dealing with many medical issues.surgeon image by Andrey Rakhmatullin from Fotolia.com
  
  Battlefield surgeons are doctors who work on troops who are fighting in a war or are stationed in a war zone who are injured on the battlefield. Battlefield surgeons have been repairing wounded troops and saving lives for almost as long as people have been fighting wars. They have a number of duties.
  
  

Initial Surgery

• Battlefield surgeons have the duty of making life and death judgment calls for troops who are critically injured and are brought in to the medical hospital at the base of operations. This means that a number of troops may be brought in at once, all with serious critical injuries, and battlefield surgeons must be able to stabilize and do immediate operations on them within the combat zone. This requires them to not only be expert surgeons and doctors but also to be able to think and make decisive decisions incredibly quickly, as they often don't have time to weigh their options.
  
  

Prep for Operation

• Sometimes there is no time to do surgery on certain patients in the combat zone, or the hospital or surgical squad does not have the proper equipment or manpower to effectively do a particular operation. In these cases, battlefield surgeons and their teams need to prepare the wounded man to be operated on in a division-level medical unit by stabilizing him so he survives the trip to the division-level hospital. The surgeon also must provide as much information on the injury and what needs to be done as possible so that other surgical teams can understand and act.
  
  

Number of Patients

• Battlefield surgical teams must be able to provide surgical care to 40 critically wounded troops at once with an organic medical equipment set. These surgical teams entail one general surgeon and one orthopedic surgeon, one medical-surgical nurse, two anesthetists, two operating room specialists and two practical nurses. The two surgeons and their team must be able to properly attend to those who are critically wounded while waiting for medical transport to move the patients to division-level hospitals for more advanced care. They must also be able to provide medical support to all of these critically wounded patients as best they can for up to 48 hours.