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NEWS | Oct. 7, 2016

Historical changes for Army Reserve Medical Command

By Lt. Col. Angela Wallace Army Reserve Medical Command

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. -- Friday, Sept. 16, marked transformation for Army Reserve Medical Command, after proposed changes were submitted in 2013 to better align the command with their active component counterpart, Army Medical Command.

ARMEDCOM Force Development officer, Lt. Col. Maggie Prater, explains the transition from proposal, to carrier status to effective date. “The Command Implementation Plan, which was submitted in April of 2013, drove part of our transformation.  MEDCOM wanted our capabilities more visible and more accessible.”

Prater explained some of the requirements prior to the effective date.  “The whole year of FY16 has been our carrier status, and in that carrier status we worked to complete activation tasks – some of these tasks had already been completed prior to us entering the carrier status.  Inactivations and activations started over the summer of 2016,” said Prater.

According to ARMEDCOM commanding general, Maj. Gen. Mary Link, the latest change within Army Reserve Medical Command goes a long way towards easier integration for total force implementation for the global requirements the Army receives.

“The goal of this transition was to better support Army Medical Command, because that’s our go-to-war mission, and meet their requirements.  Another goal, perhaps more significant for the reserve component is that our providers – nurses, doctors, dentists, and nurse anesthetists who rotate on a 90 day basis, have never had a structure to support those rotations.  

“In other words… it takes four physicians – four different people - to make that one single doctor position successful for the whole year.  We’ve never had a structure that supports that rotation process, and now we do.  Those medical backfill battalions actually build those 90 day rotations into our structure – creating efficiency,” said Link.

Transition from carrier status to effective date carried a long list of tasks for units impacted by the change, but Prater confirmed the transitions looked very good despite anticipated challenges.

"We have 63 units that came into existence on Friday, September 16th.  G1 has been monitoring pay actions, there are training systems where we could see the new UIC’s but they weren’t necessarily aligned in their hierarchies, so we were waiting to see if everything automatically switched…  I think this new construct will allow our Soldiers a greater opportunity to use those skills that they came into the Army to do. Pulling out the capabilities and setting them up to stand alone – like the blood dets, the vet dets… I think that’s going to be huge.  The TMC’s too.  That’s going to make mob missions a lot easier for everyone,” said Prater.

Link is pleased with the progress and the direction her command is headed.

“This is so important for ARMEDCOM because it provides easier access and gets us much closer to where we need to be for our go-to-war mission.  We’ve increased positions while streamlining processes.  For the Army, it helps our brigade and battalion commanders really identify and start relating to and building relationships with those MEDCOM organizations that they will work with in the future.”

For the commander and her team, the effective date only marked the next step in the cycle. "There’s still a lot more hard work left to do to finish the transformation process.  The staff has stepped up.  The brigades have stepped up.  This has been a total team effort, and I thank everyone for their hard work.  We’ve kept it transparent both internally to the organization and external to our partners,” Link said.