Medical staff deploy on Exercise Vigorous Warrior 2015

On 1 through 12 June 2015, members of the Office of the Surgeon General of the Slovak Armed Forces took part in an international medical exercise, dubbed Vigorous Warrior 2015 in Hradec Králové. The deployment exercise saw the participants from 15 countries bringing their specialized laboratories, rapid deployment teams for detection of epidemics, ambulance vehicles with crews, and medical container modules to the training grounds. The modules were connected to the hospital corridor of the 7th Field Hospital in service with the Czech Armed Forces. The exercise was designed to test the skills of NATO medical personnel and was based on a fictitious scenario where an international field hospital and medical elements were deployed in an environment with a high level of biological contamination risks, including leakage of dangerous biological substances. Exercise Vigorous Warrior was NATO’s largest exercise in the field of military medical service. A total of 200 members of the Czech Armed Forces and 150 foreign participants attended the training exercise.

“The theme of the exercise was influenced by repeated and increasingly frequent occurrences of highly infectious diseases. The drills underlined the necessity of maintaining and deepening international cooperation at the level of field hospital, primary medical care, laboratories, and extraction means, as well as of rehearsing the ability to cooperate with different teams,” emphasized the Surgeon General of the SVK Armed Forces, Col MUDr Vladimír Lengvarský, MPH. The exercise was delivered by the NATO Centre of Excellence for Military Medicine (NATO MILMED COE), based in Budapest, in liaison with the Czech Armed Forces. The Vigorous Warrior series takes place in two-year intervals, and this was the third such exercise.