USAFSAM: The Air Force's Medical Educators

  • Published
  • By Jay Marquart
  • 711th Human Performance Wing
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE --  Flight surgeons, aerospace physiologists, public health and bioenvironmental officers, flight nurses and enlisted specialists - every year, the Air Force and its partners need thousands of skilled medical professionals to fill critical positions.

Where does the Air Force find enough people with the expertise for these roles? It trains them itself.

Delivering this training is the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, or USAFSAM,  located at Brooks City-Base, Texas. Organized under the Air Force Research Laboratory and the 711th Human Performance Wing, the mission of USAFSAM is to be first-call consultants in aerospace medicine, finding solutions to the operational needs of today and tomorrow, and preparing new aeromedical experts for future global challenges.

It's a relentless mission, one the command takes seriously.

"On a daily basis, we interact with the DoD leadership, community partners, and international partners to resolve questions of operational health and safety, preventive medicine, and air crew and special operator performance," said USAFSAM Commander Colonel Charles Fisher, a physician and chief flight surgeon. "We participate in NATO and non-NATO forums in all our functional areas. As a result, we are literally viewed as a resource for the world."

Operating under the university model, USAFSAM emphasizes three areas: education and training, research and technology development, and consultation. But that's where the similarity to a traditional civilian university ends.

Colonel Karen Weis, PhD, USAFSAM's Dean, describes the academic environment as "primarily an Air Force technical training institution with the addition of four Aerospace Medicine residency programs. If you go to a regular university, you learn general information that can be used for many different jobs. We prepare courses and train individuals so they can do a specific job, based on well-defined career field guidelines."

This focus on job-specific training allows USAFSAM to use accelerated learning techniques - a necessity because the school trains more than 6,000 students annually. In less than two months, enlisted airmen can advance from new trainees to qualified apprentices in technically complex fields such as bioenvironmental engineering.

"I showed a group of college counselors and presidents who came to us last year what we were able to do in six weeks and they were floored by the amount of knowledge these young men and women were able to absorb in a short period of time," Colonel Fisher said.

USAFSAM builds its courses using the Instructional Systems Development framework, a systematic approach to developing, implementing, and evaluating learning instruction. Courses are delivered through various channels: resident courses, non-resident courses (for example, at USAFSAM's Centers for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills in Baltimore, Cincinnati, and St. Louis), and computer-based training.

The breadth of instructional programs is even more varied. In addition to apprentice training, USAFSAM provides initial, advanced, and graduate-level education for medical officers ranging from flight surgeons and aeromedical evacuation nurses to aerospace physiologists, bioenvironmental engineers, and public health officers. At the upper extreme are three Graduate Medical Education (residency and fellowship) programs for doctors specializing in aerospace, preventive, occupational, and hyperbaric medicine.

USAFSAM hosts the single largest preventive medicine residency in the United States.

Under BRAC 2005, USAFSAM begins relocating in late 2010 to a state-of-the-art facility, the Major General Harry G. Armstrong Complex, being built at Wright-Patt. While the unit looks forward to its new location and the proximity to AFRL and 711 HPW headquarters, the move is not without challenges. Colonel Weis noted that relocaton cannot affect  the tempo of USAFSAM's mission.

"We have the same requirement in putting out the same number of students, so we will still have to be training students while we get off base at Brooks," Colonel Weis said. "But we are bringing together so many entities at Wright-Patterson that with the reorg and pulling us under the 711 HPW, it sets the stage for us to do some very exciting things."

Chief Master Sergeant John Decker, USAFSAM Group Superintendent, sums up the school's training mission and BRAC-related challenges this way: "It is difficult, but we're building the future of our Air Force...and seeing the bright young men and women we are going to hand this Air Force off to makes it all worthwhile."