VCU news

By Rachael Pawlowski
VCU Communications and Public Relations

The Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center recently was honored with a plaque from the Special Forces to honor the school’s dedication and support of the Special Operations Combat Medic (SOCM) program. 

VCU is one of the two sites in America that has a program where Special Operations medics come to have their first clinical experience. The other site is in Tampa, Fla. 

Trainees of SOCM program rotate through various areas within the hospital including the Emergency Department and Burn Unit for two weeks, while integrating hands-on assignments and academic lessons.

“After training, soldiers may possibly be deployed within 30 days of arriving to their units, and this is why the program at VCU is so greatly important to our soldiers and our nation,” said Army Master Sgt. Danny Yakel, program administrator for the Richmond, SOCM program and senior instructor at the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center (JSOMTC) at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

According to Yakel, some of the medics that are not going to go on to be Green Beret medics will leave the VCU Medical Center and return to Fort Bragg for about a week and a half of additional medical training. Following that, they will return to their units and possibly be in a combat theatre within 30 days of arrival.

VCU was selected several years ago by the JSOMTC as a training site due in large part to the high volume mix of trauma patients and critical care teaching capability at VCU, which has Central Virginia's only Level I trauma center.

VCU trains about 10 classes of students a year with 20 to 25 students per class. Since the program has started, VCU has trained more than 500 Special Operation Combat Medics.

The training opportunity was made available through the efforts of VCU's Reanimation Engineering Shock Center, or VCURES — a collaborative effort among the university's clinicians, scientists and engineers to study the cause, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of acute illness and injury. 

VCURES has a dedicated program in combat casualty care research called Operation Purple Heart and has successfully competed for millions of dollars of funding from the Department of Defense for research in this area.

“This plaque holds a lot of history and within Special Forces,” said Yakel. “Something like this is only given to those who have truly given their support to the community like VCU has.”

The plaque is now hanging on the first level of VCU's Critical Care Hospital between the two trophy cases.