 This film is about what it's like to serve in the medical organization of the US Navy. At its headquarters in Washington, Admiral Bob Higgins is Deputy Surgeon General and Chief of the Medical Corps. What is Navy medicine? Many think it's taken care of the active-duty sailors in our hospitals and clinics, but it's much, much more than that. It's taken care of the dependents, the retired and their dependents, and not only in our stateside hospitals and clinics, but around the world. We also provide health care for sailors, whether they're below the sea, on the surface or in the air, and to the fleet and marine force. We also have a major responsibility for providing planning for contingencies such as wartime or natural disasters. This is a big job, it's a very gratifying job and a very challenging job to manage this vital dynamic system. Madam McCleister, there's a STAT non-standard chemo order for 7 Wests back in Unidose. Madam McCleister, STAT non-standard chemo order for 7 Wests back in Unidose. Lieutenant Commander Jim McCleister is a pharmacy officer at Bethesda Naval Hospital. To answer your question, is this a typical pharmacy in a typical Navy hospital and the answer is no. That non-standard chemo, is that from Dr. McClellan? Yes, sir, it is. It's Adrian Meisten. Okay. And he wants to piggyback, he just called to confirm. Alright, enter it please, bring me up a couple of labels, I'll be in the other room. Aye, sir. Yes, ma'am, I'm back to you. At the big facilities such as this, it's extremely busy. We approach patient care at this facility and I think Navy-wide from a team concept. The physicians, the nurses, the other ancillary, supportive people, the laboratory and so on and so forth, we all interact much, much better than any civilian facility I've ever seen. It doesn't matter whether you're really officer-enlisted, physician, nurse, optometrist, podiatrist, we're here as a unit to take care of the entire patient. I respect everybody here because I know the training that they've been through. They know what they're doing. They really do. They're very good. The Navy Health Care Team. Thousands of officers and enlisted working together, keeping the health care of the Navy's worldwide community in good hands. At the center of the team, of course, are doctors, more than 4,000 altogether. The Navy community has a much better physician-patient ratio than America in general. At Bethesda, one of the key institutions of the teaching hospital, Morning Report. Most of the Navy's physicians begin their careers as junior officers, fresh out of medical school. Captain Bonnie Potter, specialty internal medicine, has devoted her Navy career to clinical practice and to the training of med students and young physicians like these. For me, it's been an opportunity to practice medicine, to teach students to have research opportunities, as well as the opportunity to develop administrative skills in my role as program director. I'm frequently asked why I've stayed in the Navy, and, number one, it's the patients. It's a bond. We're all in the military together. We've all been in the military together, and as such, there's camaraderie right off the bat between the students, the house staff, and the patients. I think the nurse-doctor relationship in the Navy far surpasses what you see out in the general community. Again, I think you have to go back to the team concept. It might have something to do with our rank structure also, because we're equal in rank to all the other people within the medical department. Director of Nursing Services at Bethesda is Captain Ruth Lockney. But I think it's also a mutual respect that we have for each other, and I think that makes the big difference. Charge nurse of the recovery room is Lieutenant Commander Patty Kelly. There are some big differences between military nursing and civilian nursing. The biggest difference I see as a Navy nurse is that there's a definite career plan for you for upward mobility. It's planned that by a certain level you have so much responsibility, and that gradually grows with the time that you spend in the Navy. We're going to keep you here until your legs feel normal again. You can bend your knees and raise your hips up off the bed, and then we'll get you back upstairs to your room. In the Navy, you experience different things. There's an opportunity, say, to work on the ward and get some surgical experience for a year, and then after that, maybe go on to work into an intensive care unit, and then after that, go on to nurse in Esther's at school. But it's all within the same program. You do not need to leave one hospital, lose all your benefits that you've accrued there, lose your leave time that you've accrued, and start over fresh, establish a new reputation. It's like a network. It's like working for IBM or GE. You expand your job opportunities to include not just what's at one hospital, but all over the world. Everything's fine. She's a healthy seven-year-old, no medical problem. A lot of people think that we just take care of young, healthy, active duty personnel, which is not the case. We take care of dependent children, dependent wives, dependent husbands, and retirees. This institution is just like any other hospital. We have an ICU. We have a CCU. We have regular medicine wards and surgical wards and pediatric wards. We have labor and delivery. There's no limitation on what you can do as a military nurse. I'll write the line card. You may need that in a little bit. Okay. Hello, Anson Gilbert. I'm Lieutenant Commander McGee. I'm the charge nurse. Nice to meet you, ma'am. And as I see you, how are things going for you? I'm just wondering where my wife is right now. Okay, we'll have talk with her. Well, it sets Navy nursing apart from being a civilian nurse, and there's a lot of critical care nurses out there. But what makes me different from a civilian critical care nurse is the fact that I'm a naval officer. The other things we're going to be doing here are just monitoring your heart, keeping you quiet. We're not going to let you do anything for yourself. Okay? You're in the lap of luxury. Thank you, ma'am. All the Navy's nurses in major stateside hospitals or overseas with the fleets are commissioned officers. Most are making the Navy a career, and many are men. Lieutenant Commander George Wunderlich. As a nurse co-officer, we have the unique experience of working in close proximity with the physicians on a professional level. They impart a lot of their knowledge to us, and it's very gratifying. Likewise, a nurse co-officer has the duty to go ahead and train the corpsmen so that they can go out and independently provide patient care in the fleet to our shipmates and to the Marines. DKG leads, and I've already turned on a monitor. I'm going to spike some bottles of D5W. They're the backbone of our Navy medicine, our corpsmen. And there's not another group of individuals in the whole world that equates to our Navy corpsmen. We've got an ambue bag. What they are are people that come directly from the civilian sector. They may just have graduated from high school. They may have worked for a couple of years, but the bottom line is they come into our health care system not knowing anything about health care. And what we do when they get to us is we train them from square one. We say, this is a blood pressure cuff. This is what you do with it. That's very rewarding. It can be frustrating sometimes, but by and large it's the most rewarding part of being a Navy nurse. Not all of the Navy's enlisted corpsmen work directly with patients, but all of them have attended Navy schools for full-time training in the delivery of primary care. Thousands of these men and women have received further intensive training in one or more of dozens of ancillary specialties and skills. The variety of responsibilities they carry out is virtually the whole spectrum of health care occupations. The Navy health care team constantly upgrades its capabilities. Sharing knowledge is built into the system for physicians, other professionals, nurses and corpsmen. I want you to stop right about there. In his surgery clinic, Dr. Adam Robinson sees patients, trains graduate residents in his specialty, and teaches skills to corpsmen. Clark, I want you to take a look here. Dr. Robinson shares his knowledge as widely as it can be put to use. Minority opportunities in Navy medicine are extensive. The Navy has made an open practice of prohibiting discrimination against all peoples because of grace or sex, and I think that they have been in a leadership position in this country and making sure that that is accomplished. My personal experiences in the Navy have been, I have never been stopped, or at least knowingly stopped, from accomplishing any of my personal or professional goals in the United States Navy. The Navy health care team also includes allied health professionals of every kind, Commander Pete Scaramazzino. I'm a clinical psychologist in the Navy. One of the things that's exciting to me about being in the Navy is that I have moved from treating patients to treating now, as my patient, the entire organization. The kinds of people we're looking for are the people that value that kind of challenge, flexibility, ambiguity, because it pushes, it stretches, and we're looking for people that will be productive and competitive in the year 2000. I'm involved right now in the training of those people, and that's really exciting to me, because I'm sharing my experience and being able to help pass on the skills and knowledge that I've learned in these last 20 years to those kinds of people. Your new roles as a naval officer and a clinical psychologist. I guess I'm not comfortable with the uniform and the formality. From my point of view, when I see you doing, you're doing great. They are the highest quality. Even the ones that leave, when they go back and tell their people that they've never had the experience that they've had before, and their comparisons of internships and overall clinical scope of practice is beyond anything in the civilian practice. They're wonderful people, and for me that's important, that I'm not just training navy clinical psychologists. I'm contributing to the overall professional community and the quality of that professional community. It's an opportunity that I wouldn't miss. One of the reasons that I wanted to get into medical technology was that it combined the two things that I like. One is caring for patients. That's a lot of responsibility, and a lot of people are depending on what you're doing. That's it. Lieutenant Larry Knight is in charge of the laboratory at a Caribbean base hospital. We are getting that straight now about this value. We're aware of that. We corrected it, and the doctor's very happy with our... The other thing that I was interested in was science. The tests that we perform are varied. There's many disciplines, microbiology, hematology, chemistry. We work with many instruments, and we do a lot of studies. So every time there is a new discovery, a new technique, or something like that, we are one of the first ones to use that. Research. Yes, Navy Medicine has a major commitment to research, and we've had many successes. Our frozen blood program, for one. We used to measure a storage of blood in weeks or months. We now measure in excess of 20 years in that program. It's a little tube. Measures ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Simple. The bubbles tell the story, quantitatively and qualitatively, and it's very inexpensive. And we have a major commitment to infectious disease research around the world, which not only benefits the Navy, but we share with foreign nations also. The nice thing about being at one of the Navy hospitals is that you are practicing today's medicine. The new medications that are coming out are being investigated here. We're doing even a lot of investigational work on products for clearance through the FDA. As you know, the FDA is just down the road. We have National Institutes of Health right across the street. And there's a lot of inter-cooperation, so we run investigational protocols. And it's absolutely fantastic and very fascinating what's going on here from a professional standpoint. I'm looking at it right now. You want to sit down and take a look? Fantastic. You meet a lot of experts who are top in their field. They are well-recognized around the world, civilian or military. So there are a lot of benefits. You get to rub shoulders with a lot of people that you just would not have had that opportunity to do otherwise. One of the things new Navy people hear from long-time Navy people is that the service takes care of its own. The phrase means more than care for the sick and injured. It means care for every kind of health, the welfare, fitness, morale of the whole Navy community. A physician with a good view of how the Navy takes care of its own, including the members of the health care team, is Lieutenant Steve Brown. I'm a Navy flight surgeon. It's a multifaceted job. Some of the missions that I'm on involve medevac runs when patients are injured on ships that come to this area. Aircraft, mishaps. Female shoes sailing about half an hour ago. They were coming about. Boom came across hitter. Flight surgery in the Navy is something that you have the opportunity to pursue after completing an internship. In my opinion it's probably one of the best jobs that the Navy has to offer. As far as fitness goes, the Navy does expect you to keep yourself in relatively good shape. On Navy bases there's always two to three gyms. They're fully equipped. They're equipped with free weight and auto lists. There's always swimming pools, a lot of running tracks, and we do have a lot of intramural sports. You play softball, football, wrestling, boxing, really any sport you can imagine you do here. As far as bringing up the family in the Navy, it's been a good experience, I think for both my wife and my children. My wife's been encouraging me to stay in for 30 instead of getting out at my 20-year mark. The boys I think have enjoyed it. They've made friends wherever they've gone very easily. They've enjoyed going to school on the bases and also out in the civilian community. They've had a good experience. Well, we're from Oklahoma, my family and I, and this is something that if you'd told us a few years ago that we would be sitting in a tropical place, we would have just laughed at you. I've learned to scuba dive for instance and just do things that I just didn't think that I was going to ever do or I would have waited until I was too old to do it. Now I'm doing it. I've enjoyed the variety of experiences that I've had. My infrequent moves have resulted in career progression, increased positions of responsibility, changed from my previous position such that I haven't had the opportunity to get bored or tired of what I do. I was a civilian for 10 years before I came in the Navy and I was in a rut for 10 years, but the Navy does not allow you to do that. I know that every two to three years I'm going to change jobs. I go into something more challenging according to the rank I'm in and it just spurs you on. Here in the certain general's office, we're proud of that satisfaction they have and we worked hard to build it into their careers for physicians in the medical corps, allied professionals, and the healthcare administrators in the medical service corps, nurse corps officers, dental corps officers, and every enlisted rating in the Navy medical team. These people accept the profound responsibilities that are common to healthcare professionals anywhere, but they also train for and accept contingent assignments that may be even more profoundly important in the event of hostilities. Wherever the Navy and Marine Corps operate, these people deliver. I can assure you that the Navy places a very high value on their in-service, professional education, their morale and well-being, and their career satisfaction.