• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Southern Partnership Station Brings Lifesaving Skills to Panama

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS081225-06
Release Date: 12/25/2008 12:16:00 AM

By Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Daniel Ball

PANAMA CITY, Panama (NNS) -- Southern Partnership Station (SPS) visited Panama on high speed vessel Swift (HSV 2) to work with Panamanian National Air and Maritime Service personnel and conduct instruction on topics including combat lifesaving.

Southern Partnership Station is an annual deployment of various specialty platforms to the U.S. Southern Command area of focus in the Caribbean and Latin America. The mission goal is primarily information sharing with navies, coast guards, and civilian services throughout the region.

Taught by Chief Hospital Corpsman Edmond Reyes from the Navy's Expeditionary Training Command based at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Va., the combat lifesaving course took 13 members of the Panamanian National Air and Maritime Service through six days of instruction, beginning in a classroom at Vasco Nuñez de Balboa Naval Base.

"The purpose of the course is to prepare them for disaster," said Reyes. "They learn how to respond to an emergency environment with limited supplies and to utilize the things around them to stabilize the causality until more help gets there."

The classroom instruction was augmented with hands-on training. Students learned scene safety, rapid assessment injury identification, stretcher bearing, field medicine, mass causality procedures, triage, and intravenous and nasopharyngeal airway tube administration skills among many others.

"Combat lifesaving is the core idea of providing care out in the field. You modify it to the type of operation you're performing," said Reyes. "They have their ways of doing things and we have ours, so we're giving each other a lot of information. They share their own personal experiences about medicine, like how they utilize the vegetation for tourniquets and vegetation for initial doses of antibiotics."

After Panama, SPS is scheduled to visit Jamaica, Barbados, Colombia, Panama again, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

The mission is coordinated through U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. 4th Fleet (NAVSO/ 4th Fleet) with partner nations to meet their specific training requests. As the Naval Component Command of SOUTHCOM, NAVSO's mission is to direct U.S. Naval Forces operating in the Caribbean, Central and South American regions and interact with partner nation navies within the maritime environment. Various operations include counter-illicit trafficking, Theater Security Cooperation, Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief, military-to-military interaction and bilateral and multinational training.

Fourth Fleet is the numbered fleet assigned to NAVSO, exercising operational control of assigned forces in the SOUTHCOM area of focus.

For more news from Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command, visit www.navy.mil/local/cusns/.