Military Deployment: Confrontation with the Conflict Zone, Scarcity, Danger, and Triage

Military deployments confronted medical personnel with multiple problems. This chapter focusses on issues related to the context of the military operations: problems deemed mostly situational in nature (as opposed to organisational, on which next chapter focusses). Main issues concern scarcity, including shortages of qualified and experienced personnel, and proper equipment to take care of people requiring medical care beyond the troops, dangerous deployment situations due to either natural or battle related hazards, and the confrontation with local humanitarian need. They required physicians and nurses to improvise to live up to medical professional standards. Most were able to provide medical care without losing sight of proper standards, but it could lead to frustration and disappointment in the military organisation. This is where the tension between medical and military norms, standards, and ethics is revealed. The occurrence of these problems and the means medical personnel had to deal with them demonstrate both the complexity of the deployment environment and the different deployment goals and priorities for military and medical personnel. The experienced tension demonstrates the friction between the professional identity of physicians and nurses and their non-medical commanders and peers. However, it also demonstrates their internal dual-loyalty to both their medical and military profession, even though the latter relates more to the ethics of comradery than to operational goals.