Press Release: Team Rubicon Deploys Team to Thai/Burma Border for Project Karen Shan
September 9, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Team Rubicon Deploys Team to Thai/Burma Border for Project Karen Shan
LOS ANGELES – Team Rubicon continued its medical mission to the Thai/Burma border last month by deploying a team to train field medics in battlefield medicine. The team’s primary focus was increasing the medical capabilities of the Karen Department of Health and Welfare (KDHW) and Shan medics from Free Burma Rangers (FBR). “Our hybrid team of veterans and medical professionals took two groups of medics – 76 total – through a four day rigorous curriculum – covering subjects in landmine and gunshot trauma care, long term care of trauma patients, primary care, tropical medicine, and surgical theatre and technique.” said Team Leader Zach Smith. This is the second time the team has deployed to the border.
Team Rubicon specializes in veteran focused disaster relief in the developing world and the United States. TR is committed to indigenizing medical skill sets in order to decrease foreign aid dependence in the developing world. Burma presents TR with an ideal challenge due to its access restrictions, large displaced population, and lack of conventional aid presence.
On the streets of Port-au-Prince, in the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, TR’s military veterans had an epiphany – natural disasters present the same problems that face troops in Iraq and Afghanistan: unstable populations, limited resources, horrific sights, sounds and smells. The skills cultivated on those same battlefields – emergency medicine, risk assessment and management, teamwork and decisive
