Page 154 - Journal of Special Operations Medicine - Winter 2014

Tactical Combat Casualty Care Curriculum Annual Update 2014

Stephen D. Giebner, MD

The Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care will be used to update the curriculum annually, and the
(CoTCCC) has drafted and broadcast updates to the papers will be used to update the manual in sync with its
Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) guidelines publication cycle.
since 2001. It also drafts and disseminates updates to
an accompanying curriculum used by US military, law
enforcement, civilian, and allied foreign military medi- What’s New
cal training organizations to teach TCCC courses. The The biggest physical change to the TCCC curriculum
military edition of the Prehospital Trauma Life Support is in the arrangement of the file set (Figure 1). A new
manual is the textbook for these classes. It contains 13 folder has been added that contains change packages. In
chapters pertaining to battlefield prehospital care en- this update, this folder will contain changes 13-5 (per-
dorsed by the CoTCCC. taining to hemostatic dressings) and 14-1.

The Update Process
Figure 1 TCCC
In the past, any guideline change made by the CoTCCC curriculum file set.
precipitated a curriculum revision. The change was
shown in the guidelines document as bold red text.
Changes made since the last edition of the manual were
listed in a separate document in the file set and appeared These two guideline changes were made too recently to be
in the guidelines as bold black text. In that way, stu- included in the 8th military edition of the PHTLS manual
dents and teachers of TCCC could identify changes in due for release in November 2014. Between the manual
the guidelines that were made since the release of the and the change packages added to the curriculum file set as
textbook and were, therefore, not discussed. they are released, TCCC courses can now cover all changes
that have been released as of the date of the course.
Over the past decade, each time the CoTCCC changed
the guidelines, the CoTCCC administrative staff updated Three folders have been added to provide easy access to
the entire curriculum file set. This practice proved unten- background documents that have previously been dis-
able due to the size of the file set—over 100 files totaling seminated by internal distribution—the CoTCCC Jour-
more than 1 gigabyte. The frequency of the revisions (as nal Watch, TCCC article abstracts, and the TCCC Card
many as six in 12 months) also made this practice bur- and AAR.
densome for both the administrative staff and the end us-
ers. In order to reduce this workload and streamline the There are also significant changes within the curriculum
curriculum update process, the curriculum file set will be subfolder (Figure 2). The Pre-test and Post-test folders
updated once each year from this point forward. The first have been replaced by a TCCC Test folder. Inside this
of these annual updates is about to be released. It includes folder is an Access database that contains queries and
all changes to the guidelines through change 14-1 pertain- report functions that will generate a 25-question test
ing to fluid resuscitation, released on 2 June 2014, hence with items randomly selected from a test question table.
version 140602. Each change, once approved by the di- Instructions for generating and printing a test and an-
rector of the Joint Trauma System, will be announced by swer key are provided in a separate document.
the release of a change package containing three files:
(1) the updated guidelines, (2) a slide presentation of the Due to their great size, the Tactical Field Care presenta-
change that can be spliced into the pertinent curriculum tion and its instructor guide have been partitioned into
presentation, and (3) a paper explaining why the change three sections. These files will be easier to transmit and
was made that will be submitted for publication in this this arrangement should provide natural breaks in the
journal. The slide presentations in the change packages course of instruction.

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