Doctor on the battlefield. How Israeli field medicine works

In military medicine, there is a key concept of the “golden hour” for treating the wounded on the battlefield: if full medical care is provided within the first hour after being wounded, it will save the lives of ninety percent of the wounded soldiers. Procrastination is like death - a delay in rendering assistance of only two hours leads to the fact that the number of surviving wounded plummets to ten percent.
The military medical service of the Israeli army, rightfully considered one of the most advanced in the world, has carried out a true revolution in saving the lives of the wounded on the battlefield - according to Israeli charters and instructions, the “golden hour” has been reduced to forty-three minutes, which has led to a noticeable increase in the number of rescued lives.

Emblem of the IDF Medical Troops
"And the Lord said to Moses, 'Make a brass serpent and lift it up on a pillar in the midst of the camp.
Raise it so that everyone can see it, and when people look at it,
they will immediately be healed” (Numbers 21:1-9). Alexander Shulman
"Golden Hour" saves the lives of the wounded on the battlefield

In military medicine, there is a key concept of the “golden hour” for treating the wounded on the battlefield: if full-fledged medical care is provided within the first hour after being wounded, then this will save the lives of ninety percent of the wounded soldiers. Procrastination is like death - a delay in rendering assistance of only two hours leads to the fact that the number of surviving wounded plummets to ten percent.
The military medical service of the Israeli army, rightfully considered one of the most advanced in the world, has carried out a true revolution in saving the lives of the wounded on the battlefield - according to Israeli charters and instructions, the “golden hour” has been reduced to forty-three minutes, which has led to a noticeable increase in the number of rescued lives. So, if during the war doomsday in 1973, up to thirty-five percent of the wounded Israeli soldiers died, then during the operation "Impregnable Rock" in July-August of this year, irretrievable losses among the wounded did not exceed six percent.

In Israel, they believe that the problem of the "golden hour" can only be solved as a result of a radical change in the entire multi-level structure of care for the wounded. Everything is important here - individual first-aid kits, dressings, medical equipment, time and methods of evacuating the wounded.

However crucial in saving the lives of the wounded, they have the experience and knowledge of a military doctor who is able to provide assistance in the first minutes after being wounded, and therefore a military doctor must go into battle along with the soldiers. When a doctor who knows what to do is two minutes away from the wounded, it changes the course of events.

According to the traditional scheme, according to which military doctors work in the armies of most countries of the world, first aid on the battlefield is provided to the wounded, as a rule, by paramedics - medical instructors and paramedics, and then a lot of precious time is spent on evacuating the wounded to the rear. The wounded die or end up in the hospital in a state where medicine is already powerless. This is because with most combat wounds, a serious and fatal complication develops very quickly - in just 5-10 minutes - shock. It leads to respiratory and cardiac disorders. Another danger is blood loss - with severe arterial bleeding, a person can bleed out in 10-15 minutes

In Israel, these problems are solved in many ways, but perhaps the main thing is that highly qualified medical care is provided right on the battlefield. Military doctors are directly in the combat formations of the fighting units and come to the rescue in the first minutes after being wounded. The experience and knowledge of a doctor significantly increases the chances of saving the wounded on the battlefield, but the losses of military doctors also increase.

A military doctor on the battlefield can do a lot. The military doctor captain Aleksey Kalganov, twice awarded for the courage shown in saving the lives of the wounded on the battlefield, tells. In peacetime, Aleksey Kalganov is a leading orthopedic surgeon in one of the Israeli hospitals, and during the fighting, he, like other Israeli doctors, is drafted into the army:

“We covered our commandos who started a fight with the militants. Four soldiers were seriously wounded. One was hit in the mouth by a bullet. I looked - everything Airways torn apart. I thought that he had died, but the pulse was still felt. He quickly inserted a tube into his throat, pumped out the blood from his lungs, and we evacuated him along with other wounded. In truth, I had no doubt that he was not a tenant, and he not only survived, but almost completely recovered. Everything was decided in a matter of seconds. He was just lucky that there was not just a doctor nearby, but a surgeon.”

The "golden hour" on the battlefield requires every minute to be counted to save lives. And the functions of a military doctor increase many times over. Military doctor Major Pavel Kataev was assigned to an infantry battalion fighting in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in January 2009. He tells:

“That night we were in the building next to the house, which was hit by two of our tank shells by mistake. Naturally, as soon as the radio reported a lot of casualties, we rushed there and arrived even before the dust from the explosion had settled.

The picture was as follows: all the commanders were wounded, there was no one to command the soldiers, the soldiers were shooting in all directions from all windows, and miraculously did not hit us. The hardest thing in the first minutes was to simultaneously command the soldiers and provide medical care. Many soldiers are lying, a lot of blood, groans, screams, severed limbs, shooting.

The first thing I did was to order a cease fire, carefully lower all the wounded down and take cover positions, guarding the building and not firing without reason.

All this happened in the course of perhaps no more than a minute, but it seemed like an eternity.

There were more than 20 victims, of which three were killed, whom we could no longer help, 8 were seriously injured, among them Ben Spitzer, whose both arms were torn off and his legs crushed. We immediately began doing surgical and resuscitation procedures to save their lives.

Then I contacted the head of the medical service of the Southern Military District, reported to him on the condition of the wounded, specifying what kind of specialists - for example, microsurgeons, etc. - urgently need to be prepared in hospitals to receive the wounded, since every minute can be decisive.

As soon as I was allowed to go home after the end of hostilities, I first of all went to the hospital, went to the intensive care unit to Beni, saw that his hands were sewn on (unfortunately, only one of them took root, the second had to be amputated), lifted the sheet and saw that the legs were in place, and breathed a sigh of relief.”

A military doctor on the battlefield risks his life on a par with soldiers and officers of combat units. The military doctor captain of the reserve Igor Rotshtein was urgently mobilized on July 24, 2006. He was assigned to the 13th Battalion of the Givati ​​Infantry Brigade, with which he entered Lebanon. Captain I. Rotshtein was an experienced military doctor - for five years he served as a battalion doctor in the Southern Military District, and took part in hostilities. After demobilization in 2004, he worked as a surgeon at the Poriya Hospital in Tiberias.

On the night of August 3-4, 2006, near the village of Markabe in southern Lebanon, military doctor Captain I. Rotshtein died in battle, saving the life of a wounded soldier. An exploding shell wounded a soldier. Captain I. Rotshtein hurried to help the wounded ... and the next shell covered them both.

An important reserve for the precious minutes of the "golden hour" is the use of modern vehicles for the fastest possible evacuation of the wounded from the battlefield in inpatient hospitals. The Israeli experience shows that the most effective means evacuation of the wounded are helicopters and such unusual " ambulances", like tank-bulances - Merkava tanks, equipped for mobile first-aid posts. Such armored ambulances showed themselves especially well when rescuing the wounded under enemy fire.

So, during the war in Lebanon in 2006, Israeli Air Force helicopters performed about 120 evacuation sorties, about half of them to enemy territory, where the evacuation took place under enemy fire. In these sorties, about 360 wounded were evacuated.

The helicopters were equipped with the necessary medical equipment, the crews included military doctors and paramedics, who provided qualified medical assistance directly on board the helicopters. The evacuation of the wounded by air from the battlefield to the hospital lasted an average of about 3.5 hours. For one flight, an average of 4.5 soldiers were evacuated. It should be noted that not a single wounded soldier died during the air evacuation.

Military doctor Captain Marina Kaminskaya during the war in Lebanon in July 2006 was the head of the medical service of a tank battalion. As part of her battalion, she entered Lebanon on the first day of the war and took part in the battles for the settlements of Qanatra, Maroun-ar-Rash and the city of Bint Jubail.

Captain Kaminskaya fought on a tank bulance. A tank bulance is an ordinary Merkava tank converted into a mobile medical Center and equipped with additional weapons and medical equipment. During the battle, the Bulance tank is used as an ambulance, for first aid and evacuation of the wounded.

On her tank bulance, Captain Kaminskaya was in the thick of the fighting on July 24, 2006 for the city of Bint Jbeil, the "capital" of the terrorist group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Tankers participated in the battle for Bint Jbeil. To evacuate the wounded tankers and infantrymen from the battlefield, the command sent a tank bulance of captain Kaminskaya. Tank Bulance was covered by two conventional tanks. One of the cover tanks accompanied the Bulance tank directly, and the second controlled the situation on the nearest approaches.

In the midst of the battle, wounded fighters began to enter the tank bulance. Among them was an officer who received a severe wound - a bullet from an enemy sniper hit him in the face.

Captain Kaminskaya, right on the battlefield, gave him first aid, which saved his life and took the wounded on her tank bulance to the helipad, from where the wounded were taken by helicopters to the hospital in Haifa.

During the battle, a tank was hit, covering the tank-bulance of Captain M. Kaminskaya. Of the 4 crew members of the wrecked tank, the commander of a tank platoon died, two tankers were slightly wounded.

Having come to the aid of the crew of the wrecked tank, the tank of the tank battalion commander was blown up by a land mine containing approximately 300 kg of explosives. Of the 7 people in the tank - crew members and officers of the battalion headquarters, the sergeant - driver was killed, the rest were injured.

The military doctor captain Marina Kaminskaya, despite the enemy fire, provided medical assistance to all the wounded, and successfully evacuated them on her tank bulance.

In total, during the fighting, Captain Marina Kaminskaya saved the lives of more than 25 wounded soldiers.

Any war is a kind of testing ground not only for new weapons, but also for the latest technologies and means of saving the lives of the wounded. The operation of the Israeli troops "Indestructible Rock", carried out in July-August of this year against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, was no exception.

As you know, during the "golden hour" the wounded die due to two main reasons: shock and blood loss. It is believed that up to eighty percent of the wounded die due to blood loss.

The military medical directorate of the IDF is acting in the direction of solving precisely these most acute problems of saving the lives of the wounded. To this end, during the operation "Indestructible Rock", the troops successfully tested in combat a whole range of new technologies and medical supplies resulting in a significant increase in the number of lives saved.

From time immemorial, a tourniquet has been used as the only way to stop bleeding. The tourniquet design has not changed since the battles of the ancient Romans, and today armies around the world still use rubber hemostatic tourniquets.

The Israeli army abandoned the traditional tourniquets - now in the backpack of each soldier there is a "turnstile", which is a 96-centimeter nylon sleeve with a tourniquet inside, equipped with a handle. The handle is part of a device consisting of locks and Velcro. Using such a "turnstile", a soldier can stop the bleeding on his own, even if he is wounded in the arm. Soldiers are taught how to use the "turnstile" while still on the course of a young fighter.

The great advantage of the "turnstile", along with ease of use, is that it creates more pressure on blood vessels and in a more efficient way. It is designed to ensure that the pressure is optimal - not harming the nerves and at the same time stopping the blood.

In the case when the "tourniquet" is not suitable, for example, in the case of a high amputation or a wound in the stomach, the Israeli army began to use hemostatic dressings - containing components that promote blood clotting and are designed to stop external bleeding of varying intensity, including damage to large vessels.

In addition to using these new hemostatic agents, every Israeli military medic on the battlefield now carries ampoules of hexacapron, which speeds up the process of bleeding, in the bag of every Israeli military medic. According to doctors, it is a reliable means of saving lives.

After stopping the bleeding and with a large loss of blood, Israeli military doctors directly on the battlefield inject an aqueous solution of blood plasma powder. On the battlefield, there is no way to pick up a blood type, and therefore the IDF began to use frozen-dried plasma.

The powder is obtained from blood from healthy donors with blood type AB and is suitable for any person.

The great advantage of this technology is that, unlike donated blood portions that require refrigeration or freezing, blood plasma powder can be taken directly to the battlefield. A package of plasma powder and a bottle of liquid are all you need to prepare an aqueous solution. They are mixed and after three minutes the plasma of the desired type is ready.

During the fighting in Gaza, such a new tool as a kind of “zipper”, reliably “tightening” open wounds and even the stumps of severed limbs. However, its use requires a sufficiently high qualification of military doctors.

Did not go unnoticed by Israeli military doctors and pain shock, also leading to the death of the wounded. If earlier wounded soldiers endured pain, waiting for evacuation, now they are for sale great importance neutralization of pain, which facilitates the care of the wounded and helps to avoid psychological problems in the future. All military paramedics have automatic syringes for injecting morphine, as well as a new drug called Aktik, based on fentanyl, 100 times more potent than morphine.

This medicine is placed under the tongue of the wounded, and the pain disappears for at least an hour. Among the advantages of "aktik" can be attributed the fact that it not only alleviates the suffering of the wounded, but also does not lead to a fall. blood pressure, which is one of the problems with the use of morphine and its derivatives.

Among other medical innovations used to save the lives of the wounded during the golden hour, Israeli military medics now have a portable ultrasound scanner to detect internal bleeding in the field, blood oxygen saturation meter to check the condition of the wounded, carbon dioxide detector to check the effectiveness artificial respiration, fentatyl lozenge for quenching acute pain within a minute.

“Ambulance” and scolded and thanked.

They scold most often because it takes a long time to wait. The words “you must”, “you must” fly to the doctors ... And the caller is unaware that, besides him, someone else in the city is bad. To see the work of the ambulance from the inside, I am asking for trips to the brigade No. 75 of the NSSMP - the Novokuznetsk ambulance station, which includes young paramedics Ruslan Chernyshov and Lyudmila Kalaeva.

An ordinary weekday, the beginning of the week, no weekends, no holidays, when the frequency of calls increases significantly.

There is morning bustle at the station, some teams are finishing their shift, placing their suitcases and bags in the cells, others are just getting ready for calls, checking the main suitcase - the ambulance doctor's packing. Helping each other, doctors and drivers begin to transfer this very weighty package, an ECG device, a large bag with solutions, an intensive care kit, a toxicological kit, an obstetrics kit, soft stretchers, and tires into cars. Who knows what will be needed today?

First challenge.

“But he uses you as a taxi- I wonder - in fact, the call is false”. - “About 70 percent of these Ruslan explains. - For example, last week a woman at two in the morning called an ambulance to her 14-year-old son who had a toothache, and then she was indignant that we could not help him or take him to the dentist, and then bring him back.

A separate topic is lonely grandmothers.

Another of our elderly patients, the son gave a talking tonometer. Everybody! Now we go to her, as to our home. Grandmother demands to first measure the pressure with our device, then double-checks with her own, immediately makes various diagnoses for herself and asks for an injection or some kind of pill. Another one of the regulars, on the contrary, refuses our injections and medicines - “you never know what to give”, prefers her pill. And most often the older generation to the question: “What worries you?” - begins to complain about loneliness, the inattention of doctors in polyclinics, the lack of people “with whom you can talk.”

Another call to distant Kuibyshevo, to Ispirskaya street.

As a landmark, they give the more famous - Cascade. Private sector on a mountain near Bungur. Let's go to the navigator. Stop. Dead end. We return. The navigator clearly leads the wrong way. Ruslan makes his way through the snowdrifts to the nearest house, at this time the driver Sergey Petrovich Belousov notices that someone is giving signals almost from the top of the mountain, and then runs towards us along an inconspicuous path. Only thanks to the mother of a thirteen-year-old girl, who is waiting for help with incomprehensible, intensifying pains in her stomach, having overcome a steep climb, we get to the right house. “It’s good that it’s cold today and the crust has subsided,” Sergei Petrovich rejoices, “if there had been snow, and even worse a thaw, we wouldn’t have risen. Summer tires, no money for winter”.

Sergey Petrovich is an experienced driver: he worked on buses for 28 years, after his retirement, for 6 years now, he drives an ambulance. He is a full-fledged member of the brigade, if necessary, and will lower a stretcher with a patient from the eleventh floor, and carry a drunken or drug addict to the ambulance, and protect doctors from inadequate patients. “ They can't he explains, they need to be treated. And the fact that the "sick" drunk, sometimes with fists, sometimes with a knife, throws himself at the doctor - this is in our order of things. No one to protect. Rusik only recently got out of the hospital after talking with such a patient. Others can only be entered with the police. Well, when the brigade is staffed with men, but what to take from the girls?

We are taking the girl with abdominal pains to the 4th children's hospital. On the way, her mother tells how lucky it is that the roads to them were cleared today. “We ourselves are thrown into this,” she says, “where to go, the children go to school, we have to work. That bridge over there was built at our own expense, so the road to the stop is shorter.” Through the bridge and we could soon get to the main road, but, alas, the frame placed on it shows that our GAZ does not fit in size. What then to say about fire trucks?

From Kuibyshev we go through the whole city to Novobaydaevka.

An employee of a dental clinic has high blood pressure. The injection helps bring it down. The patient, after deliberation, agrees to go to the hospital. “As a rule,” explains Ruslan Chernyshov, “hypertension is a long-term sore in the majority, but basically patients ignore the medications that are selected for them individually, are not treated, and when an attack occurs, more often it happens at night, they call an ambulance” distracting us from serious challenges. But we can't come”.

Time for lunch.

In 8 minutes we are at the target.

On the fifth floor with bags at the ready they went up in a swoop. 80-year-old Oktyabrina Mikhailovna very bad. Speech is inhibited, slurred, unable to explain what is wrong with her. Relatives say that everything was fine in the morning. Most of all, her husband is worried, rushing around the rooms. They ask him. It turns out that the woman is diabetic, the analysis on the glucometer shows that the sugar is very low and the pressure is 70 to 40. While Ruslan demands a warm drink with sugar, the second paramedic Lyudmila Kalaeva runs to the car for a bag with solutions and a stretcher. Grandma is gradually starting to come to her senses. “ Well, my dear, how do you feel?” Ruslan asks. “ Badly”, she replies in a barely audible voice. The dropper brings the patient to her senses, she is surprised at the commotion around her and strangers. Ruslan changes the second bottle of medicine and holds it on his hand held high. There is no tripod. “ Well, my dear, is it better? he asks. - Now an injection in the buttock. Well, how can you not? I'm not luring you, only in medicinal purposes ". Grandmother begins to smile, looks at Ruslan: “ What a young, handsome man. To me first time so good the ambulance arrives”.

Entry removed.

The brigade is going to the next challenge, I, having experienced and run over, - to the editorial office.

Olga Volkova. Alexander Bokin (photo)

In military medicine, there is a key concept of the “golden hour” for helping the wounded on the battlefield: if full-fledged medical care is provided within the first hour after being wounded, this will save the lives of 90% of the injured soldiers. Procrastination is similar to death - a delay in rendering assistance of only two hours leads to the fact that the number of survivors after injury drops rapidly to 10%.
The military medical service of the Israeli army is rightfully considered one of the most advanced. Recently, she has improved the system for saving the lives of the wounded on the battlefield, shortening the golden hour up to 43 minutes, which led to a noticeable increase in the number of lives saved. So, if during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, up to 35% of the wounded soldiers died, then during Operation Protective Rock in July-August of this year, irretrievable losses among the wounded did not exceed 6%.

Doctor on the battlefield

In Israel, they believe that the problem of the "golden hour" can only be solved as a result of a radical change in the entire multi-level structure of care for the wounded. Everything is important here: individual first-aid kits, dressings, medical equipment, time and methods of evacuating the wounded.

However, the decisive factor in saving the lives of the wounded is the experience and knowledge of a military doctor, who is able to provide assistance in the first minutes after being wounded, and therefore a military doctor must go into battle along with the soldiers. When a doctor who knows what to do is two minutes away from the wounded, it changes the course of events.

As part of the traditional scheme, according to which military doctors work in the armies of most countries of the world, first aid on the battlefield is usually provided by paramedics and orderlies, and then a lot of time is spent on evacuating the wounded to the rear. The wounded die or end up in the hospital in a state where medicine is already powerless. This happens because with most combat wounds very quickly, in just 5-10 minutes, a serious and fatal complication develops - shock. It leads to a disorder of breathing and cardiac activity. Another danger is blood loss: with severe arterial bleeding, a person can bleed out in 10-15 minutes.

In Israel, these problems are solved in many ways, but the key solution is the provision of high-quality medical care right on the battlefield.

Military doctors are directly in combat formations fighting units and come to the rescue in the first minutes after being wounded.

A military doctor on the battlefield can do a lot. This is the story of military doctor Captain Aleksey Kalganov, who was twice awarded for his bravery in saving the lives of the wounded on the battlefield. In peacetime, Alexey Kalganov is a leading orthopedic surgeon in one of the Israeli hospitals, and during the fighting, he, like other Israeli doctors, is drafted into the army.

“We covered our special forces who entered the battle. Four soldiers were seriously injured. One was hit in the mouth by a bullet. I looked - all the airways were torn apart. I thought that he had died, but the pulse was still felt. He quickly inserted a tube into his throat, pumped out the blood from his lungs, and we evacuated him along with other wounded. In truth, I had no doubt that he was not a tenant, and he not only survived, but almost completely recovered. Everything was decided in a matter of seconds. He was just lucky that there was not just a doctor nearby, but a surgeon.”

Military doctor Major Pavel Kataev was assigned to an infantry battalion fighting in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in January 2009. “That night we were in the building next to the house, which was hit by two of our tank shells by mistake. Naturally, as soon as the walkie-talkie reported a lot of casualties, we rushed there and arrived before the dust from the explosion had settled. The picture was as follows: all the commanders were wounded, there was no one to command the military, the soldiers were shooting in all directions from all windows and miraculously did not hit us.

In the first minutes, the hardest thing was to simultaneously command the soldiers and provide medical care. Many soldiers are lying, a lot of blood, groans, screams, shooting. The first thing I did was to order a cease fire, carefully lower all the wounded down and take cover positions, guarding the building and not firing without reason. All this happened in the course of perhaps no more than a minute, but it seemed like an eternity. There were more than 20 victims, three killed, whom we could no longer help, eight seriously injured, among them Ben Spitzer, whose both arms were torn off and his legs crushed. We immediately began doing surgical and resuscitation procedures to save their lives. Then I contacted the head of the medical service of the Southern Military District, reported to him about the condition of the wounded, specifying what kind of specialists, for example, microsurgeons, should be urgently trained in hospitals to receive the wounded, since every minute can be decisive.

As soon as I was allowed to go home after the end of hostilities, I first of all went to the hospital, went to the intensive care unit to see Beni, saw that his hands were sewn on (unfortunately, only one survived, the second had to be amputated), lifted the sheet, saw that the legs are in place, and breathed a sigh of relief.

A military doctor on the battlefield risks his life on a par with soldiers and officers of combat units. Military doctor reserve captain Igor Rotshtein was urgently mobilized on July 24, 2006. He was assigned to the 13th Battalion of the Golani Infantry Brigade, with which he entered Lebanon. Rothstein was an experienced military doctor: for five years he served as a battalion doctor in the Southern Military District, and took part in hostilities. After demobilization in 2004, he worked as a surgeon at the Poriya Hospital in Tiberias.

On the night of August 4, 2006, near the village of Markabe in southern Lebanon, Rothstein died in battle, saving the life of a wounded soldier. An exploding shell wounded a soldier. The doctor hurried to help the wounded, and the next shell covered them both.

Evacuation of the wounded under fire

An important reserve for the precious minutes of the "golden hour" is the use of modern transport for the fastest possible evacuation of the wounded from the battlefield to inpatient hospitals. Israeli experience shows that the most effective means of evacuation are helicopters and tank-bulances - Merkava tanks, equipped for mobile first-aid posts and equipped with additional weapons. Such armored ambulances performed particularly well in rescuing the wounded under enemy fire. So, during the war in Lebanon in 2006, Israeli Air Force helicopters carried out about 120 evacuation flights, about half of them to enemy territory, where the evacuation took place under enemy fire. In these sorties, they took out about 360 wounded.

The helicopters were equipped with the necessary medical equipment, the crews included military doctors and paramedics, providing qualified medical assistance directly on board helicopters. The evacuation of the wounded by air from the battlefield to the hospital lasted an average of about 3.5 hours. For one flight, an average of 4.5 soldiers were evacuated. During the air evacuation, not a single wounded soldier died.

Military doctor Captain Marina Kaminskaya during the war in Lebanon in July 2006 was the head of the medical service of the tank battalion, in which she entered Lebanon on the first day of the war and took part in the battles for the settlements of Qanatra, Maroun al-Rash and the city of Bint Jubail . Kaminskaya fought on a tank bulance. On it, she was in the thick of the fighting for Bint Jubail, a key location for the Hezbollah terrorist group in southern Lebanon on July 24, 2006. To evacuate wounded tankers and infantrymen from the battlefield, the command sent her tank bulance. The car was covered by two conventional tanks, one - directly, and the second - on the nearest approaches.

At the height of the battle, the wounded began to arrive in the tank bulans. Among them was an officer who received a severe wound - a bullet from an enemy sniper hit him in the face. Kaminskaya gave him first aid right on the battlefield and took him on a tank bulance to the helipad, from where the wounded were transported by helicopters to a hospital in Haifa.

During the battle, a tank was hit, covering her tank-bulance. Of the four crew members of the wrecked tank, the commander of a tank platoon died, two tankers were slightly injured. The battalion commander's tank, which came to the aid of the crew, was blown up by a land mine containing approximately 300 kilograms of explosives. Of the seven people in the tank - crew members and officers of the battalion headquarters - a sergeant, a driver, were killed, the rest were injured.

Kaminskaya, despite enemy fire, provided medical assistance to all the wounded and successfully evacuated them on her tank bulance. In total, during the fighting, she saved the lives of more than 25 wounded soldiers.

New technologies save the wounded on the battlefield

Any war is a kind of testing ground not only for new weapons, but also for the latest technologies to save the lives of the wounded.
Operation Protective Edge was no exception.

It is believed that up to 80% of the wounded die due to blood loss.. In the course of Operation Protective Rock, the troops successfully tested in combat a whole range of new technologies and medical equipment, which made it possible to significantly increase the number of lives saved.

A tourniquet was used as the only way to stop bleeding. Now the Israeli army has abandoned the traditional rubber bands: now in the backpack of each soldier there is a “turnstile”, which is a 96-cm nylon sleeve with a tourniquet inside, equipped with a handle. The handle is part of a velcro device that allows a soldier to stop bleeding on his own, even if he is wounded in the arm. Soldiers are taught how to use the "turnstile" while still on the course of a young fighter.

In cases where the "tourniquet" is not suitable, for example, with a high amputation or a wound in the stomach, the Israeli army began to use hemostatic dressings containing components that promote blood clotting and are designed to stop external bleeding of varying intensity, including damage to large vessels .

In addition to using these new hemostatic agents, every military medic on the battlefield now has ampoules of hexacapron, which accelerates the process of stopping bleeding.

At big blood loss military doctors directly on the battlefield inject a solution of blood plasma powder.
The advantage of this technology in that, unlike portions of donated blood that require refrigeration or freezing, blood plasma powder can be taken with you to the battlefield. A packet of plasma powder and a bottle of liquid are all you need to prepare the solution.

During the fighting in Gaza, it was tested and such a new tool as a kind of "zipper", reliably tightening open wounds, however, its use requires a fairly high qualification of military doctors.

A common cause of death of the wounded is pain shock.. Now all military paramedics have automatic syringes for injecting morphine, as well as a new tool - "aktik", based on fentanyl, a hundred times more powerful than morphine.

This medicine is placed under the tongue and the pain disappears for at least an hour. The advantages of "aktik" include the fact that it not only alleviates the suffering of the wounded, but also does not cause pressure drop, and this is one of the problems in the use of morphine and its derivatives.

Among other medical innovations used to save the lives of the wounded during the "golden hour", in service with Israeli military doctors are portable scanner Ultrasound to detect internal bleeding in the field, a blood oxygen saturation meter to check the condition of the wounded, a carbon dioxide detector to check the effectiveness of artificial respiration and fentatyl lozenge to relieve acute pain within a minute.