Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Surveillance Course

For the last couple of days, we've been up at Ft. Meade for a three-day course on Defense Occupational and Environmental Health Surveillance, or DOEHS. The main purpose of the course is to teach us, as preventive medicine physicians, what the other members of the preventive medicine team do, both while deployed and in garrison. 

The preventive medicine team, in addition to the PM physician, includes environmental science officers, environmental science engineers, entomologists, industrial hygienists, and a slew of others, included enlisted preventive medicine techs and environmental science techs. We started the course with a "where do they go when they're deployed?" talk, which goes something like this:

Level 1: Each Company has a field sanitation team, which is two enlisted soldiers who, as an additional duty, are responsible for field sanitation (latrines, bug spraying, etc). Since this is an additional duty, nobody wants to do it, and is sometimes (but not supposed to be) given as punishment. 

Level 2: Each Battalion (which has ~5 companies) has a PM detachment, with one junior (2LT or 1LT) environmental science officer and one junior (private-specialist) environmental science or PM tech. 

Level 3: Each Division has a PM physician as a consultant to the Division Surgeon. In addition, there's a PM team, roughly 5x the size of a Battalion-level team.

Level 4: Area Medical Laboratories. There were two, but one was just deactivated. These are complete and completely deployable labs, with almost the capabilities of public health labs in the States. When they deploy, they have a total of 43 people, 19 officers (including 1 PM physician) and 24 enlisteds.

Level 5: Public Health Command, at Aberdeen Proving Ground. That's the definitive authority for everything public health/preventive medicine in the Army.

The confusing part comes when you start to consider who answers to whom. It would make sense to put the Battalion PM assets under the command of the Division PM assets, but this isn't true. The Battalion PM assets fall within the Battalion, and thus, the Division PM doc doesn't have the ability to directly ask the Battalion PM to do something.

It's the Army. It's sometimes a little confusing.

Today we focused more on what people are actually doing while deployed. We learned about the equipment that the enlisted techs use on their inspections. Here are some pictures:

Above is a rucksack with everything a PM or environmental science tech needs to do an assessment of a forward operating base. It's actually quite amazing all the stuff the pack contains, and it still weighs ~35 pounds.

This is a kit to test untreated water; for example, if they're evaluating a lake or river to use as source for a water treatment facility. To give you a sense of scale, everything's packed inside a cooler. All of the testing is done at Public Health Command; they send the cooler, the techs fill the bottles according to instructions, and then send it back for testing. The whole process takes around 6 weeks.

Tomorrow we're going to hear from the other sections. Although this won't be as pertinent to my first assignment with civil affairs, there will be other deployments in the future, so I should try to keep this all in mind.