Battalion Surgeon Life

Introduction

I spent my first two years post-residency as a Battalion Surgeon for a BSB. For those of you in primary care (FM, IM, Peds, EM, OB), there is a solid chance your first position in the Army will be a Battalion Surgeon. I will get into all aspects of this position with the promise, as always, to be brutally honest. The counterpart to this position, the Flight Surgeon, is a comparable position with a few key distinctions. I will be bugging one of my colleagues in that role to type something up about it. 

There are numerous other first-job positions available. These include vanilla clinic provider (often MAPPED to a unit stationed elsewhere), hospitalists, etc. There are many available positions and with their wide range of unique responsibilities, you'll just need to explore those for yourselves! But very quickly, the MAP position: this entails that you have a day job at one location, but are assigned to a unit at another location. This means that when they deploy, so do you. Your other responsibilities vary at their discretion, but generally, they will leave you alone to do your day job unless it is a larger training operation or a deployment. 

Job description

Battalion Surgeon

No, this is not a surgery gig... You will be the primary care provider for 300-500 soldiers. You will have sick call and scheduled patients on a M-F schedule. You are almost guaranteed at least one four-day holiday weekend a month and you will likely not be working nearly as hard as you did in residency. Your experience will vary SIGNIFICANTLY based on the clinic you work out of and your command structure. Depending on your specific position, your "Army" job will entail running a Role 1 or Role 2 during operations. In a Role 1, you have two beds, some barebones supplies and a handful of bright-eyed 19-year-old medics. Your job is to fix the small problems and return them to duty, or if you can't fix them, stabilize the patient for them to survive long enough to make it to a Role 2. At the Role 2, you have four beds, more medics, X-ray, an iStat, an ultrasound (if you're lucky), suction, AED, ventilators, more medications, and supplies. Your job is largely the same as the Role 1 - fix what you can fix and for what you can't, send it up the chain! Additionally, your job is to train your medics! In my experience, they are almost always eager to learn and want to improve. There are a few hands in the pot with the training and you may have to fight for some territory, but overall, you have the opportunity to make a big difference in their medical education.

The treatment tent is YOUR domain! You choose the organization, influence the medication/supply orders, etc.

Day-to-day

I will speak to my own experience as that is all I can say for sure! My time as a Battalion Surgeon was incredibly chill. I started sick call at 0700, saw scheduled patients from 0900-1130, and was home before 1400 most days. The clinic work is easy and enjoyable - my medics write my HPI and use my autotexts to write most of my notes for me. They even can place orders (meds/rads/labs) on my behalf! 

Sick call will vary by location, but generally, people who have acute problems that were not ER worth will show up very early in the morning and be screened by medics. Some things the medics can treat on their own (cold, minor ankle sprain, etc) and others will need your touch. For those latter patients, they will be scheduled during your sick call hours. You will get to choose what kind of things you want your medics seeing on their own and what things you want to see. There is a great reference, AD-TMC, that you can just default to in deciding what the medics can handle on their own. I've had sick call vary from 0-10 patients in a day. 

For your scheduled patients, you will have 20-minute appointments. Depending on your clinic, they may be more or less strict about scheduling procedure blocks or how many patients you need to see in a week. For my clinic, it was 60.  

Other responsibilities

You may have the role of tracking/correcting readiness within your Battalion. This means doing PHAs, writing, reviewing, and rewriting profiles, helping command know who to hound down for their dental, or vaccines, or whatever else they are behind on.

My command never made me do group PT. I had to do the standard PT test every 6 months and go to the field every so often, but I really couldn't complain much. As you can imagine, this experience can vary wildly based on your command. I have colleagues who have formation and PT at 0500 every day, and have weekly meetings with command. I am grateful to have not had that experience. 

Deployment

Never did it as a Battalion Surgeon.