Building the Future Force of Navy Medicine

This blog post was shared with us by the US Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Stay connected on Twitter and Facebook.

“Our mission spans the globe, from U.S. hospitals within the TRICARE network, to our operational fleet and fleet Marine forces, overseas hospitals, Medical Battalions, Research Units, and hospital ships. None of this would be possible without a razor sharp focus on taking care of our people. Integral to that is having the right education, training, recruiting/retention, and diversity programs that attract, train, retain, and build our future force.”

~ Vice Admiral Adam M. Robinson Jr., MC, Surgeon General of the Navy

Background

This year’s focus of the Navy Surgeon General annual Leadership Symposium was “Total Force-Focusing on the Future.” The Symposium’s focus was building the future force of Navy Medicine and objectives included: 1) Improving readiness to fully support current and future operations; 2) Attaining agility in how we lead, how we communicate, and how we support our diverse staff; 3) strengthening our delivery of primary care; and 4) adapting to the changing environmental healthcare needs of our population.

The foundation of our future force is having a highly skilled and diverse people with the right education and training in order to deliver cutting edge health care, anytime, anywhere, in support of the full range of military operations, from the benefit mission at home, to the research and development advancements that save lives, to the combat casualty care we provide, from the battlefield to the bedside.

Our personnel are the single most important asset in our organization, constituting about 70% of our O&M budget. How we educate, train, organize, and lead our people is critical to mission accomplishment. This includes Active Duty and Reserve personnel, Officers and Enlisted, Civilians, and Contractors.

Building the Future Force

■Total Force Concept: Our Medical Manpower Strategy begins with measuring how to best allocate our limited resources and diversity of our talent across the Enterprise. Over a year ago, we began an Enterprise-wide assessment of the size, specialty levels, and distribution of our Total Force billet requirements and personnel inventories. This yielded the development of several assessment tools that include the following:

■MedMACRE provides an analytical defense for sizing our force, especially for less than full mobilization scenarios and issues relating to Force Specialty Mix.

■Demand Based Staffing Tool is a regional and command level management tool that takes inputs from MedMACRE to help create uniform requirements.

■Fit-to-Fill Assessments help identify who is doing the work and where the work is being done.

■Total Force Assessments provide more transparent assessments of force mix, distribution, and Military Training Facility workload, and are used in partnership with BUMED, Regions, and Commands.

■Medical Education Training Campus (METC) is the largest consolidation of service training in defense history. Located in San Antonio, METC is a fully integrated tri-service education and training school to prepare Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen. METC will leverage the assets of all defense health-care practitioners in order to support about 9,000 students daily.

■Outreach: BUMED recently became a stakeholder in the CHINFO-run “America’s Navy” national outreach effort. We will be participating in at least 8 Navy Weeks in 2011 and more than 80 speaking and community outreach events nation-wide to tell the Navy Medicine story and support recruiting efforts to build the future leaders of our medical team.

■Diversity: Navy Medicine is still the front-runner in creating diversity in the Navy. We are executing a Diversity Action Plan that aligns to CNO’s 5 pronged approach of effective strategic communications, training, outreach, mentorship, and accountability. Diversity is a strategic imperative that we must embrace if we are to remain a competitive force.

Key Themes

Our Total Force Concept is about standardizing how we allocate, recruit, retain, educate, train and incentivize the right work force for the right mission across the Enterprise in order to eliminate gaps and overlaps, increase efficiencies through resource sharing, and integrate learning strategies. With the Secretary of Defense’s emphasis on thrift and efficiency, we must define our requirements and optimize our people because there will be even greater pressure coming to properly size our Total Force to maximize benefit while reducing costs. METC will ensure that the training we deliver to our corpsmen remains exceptional for generations to come.

This article was sponsored by Forensic Science Books.