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Civil–military cooperation on operational deployment: the Bentiu State Hospital medical training programme
  1. Jeyasankar Jeyanathan1,2,
  2. J E Smith3,4 and
  3. E Sellon5
  1. 1 Academic Department of Military Anaesthesia and Critical Care, Institute of Research and Development, Birmingham Research Park, Birmingham, UK
  2. 2 Department of Intensive Care Medicine and Department of Anaesthetics, St George’s University Hospital London, London, UK
  3. 3 Academic Department of Military Emergency Medicine, Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, Birmingham, UK
  4. 4 Emergency Department, University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, Plymouth, UK
  5. 5 Academic Department of Military Surgery and Trauma, Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, Birmingham, UK
  1. Correspondence to Jeyasankar Jeyanathan, Academic Department of Military Anaesthesia and Critical Care, Institute of Research and Development, Birmingham Research Park, Birmingham B15 2SQ, UK; jjeyanathan{at}doctors.org.uk

Abstract

The United Nations Mission in South Sudan has a mandate to protect civilians and support the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Recognising this during Operation TRENTON, UK staff of the UN level 2 hospital were able to support the people of Bentiu through initiatives to develop local health services with on-the-ground civil–military cooperation. The Bentiu State Hospital Medical Training Programme was developed to train and mentor staff associated with healthcare in Bentiu, to help improve service delivery, support local health services with on-the-ground non-governmental organisation/military coordination and to create a platform to facilitate the sharing of information to support local health services with the overall humanitarian response. It was recognised how important it was to deliver a programme that carefully understood the unique challenging limitations, circumstances and environment. Hence careful tailoring of the programme was essential to ensure that the training was valuable, implementable and durable, long beyond the operational deployment of TRENTON. Despite the logistical and practical complexities, the programme was very positively received, and the training team believed that the development and progress made would build a small part of the future infrastructure of healthcare delivery in the region. Future contingency operations are likely to take place in the resource- limited austere environment. As reflected in this deployed initiative, local health training activity providing key knowledge to build resilience for the current and immediate future is a precious and important defence engagement utility.

  • United Nations
  • UN
  • rresource-limited environment
  • medical education & training
  • medical education & training (see Medical Education & Training)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/jramc-2019-001302

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors JJ, JES and ES have been involved in the inception, writing and final editing processes of this article.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.