Pre-Deployment Phase: Transitions, Preparations, Tensions

This chapter focusses on medical personnel’s transition into the armed forces, their education and training (including ethics), and the way they were prepared for deployments. Their experience of the organisational culture they encountered upon entrance into service, including its hierarchy, bureaucracy, and traditions, demonstrates tensions between the medical and military professional identity and culture. This chapter reveals the position medical personnel held within the armed forces in general and within their specific units by analysing general as well as specific pre-deployment preparations, including Mission Specific Instructions (MGI), medical-specific training, expectation management, exercises, teambuilding, and integration. Education and preparations became more formalised. However, many problems remained continuously present, including insufficient practical training and teambuilding and continuous ambiguity over instructions on the provision of medical care to third parties. Physicians and nurses experienced tension between medical and military norms, standards, and ethics, as well as clashes in organisational culture, prior to deployments.