Publications

Each time a military member on deployment has an exacerbation of a chronic disease that may have been reasonably foreseeable before the mission there is a potential risk to mission success, individual health, and the safety of other allied military members. Currently NATO Member Nations employ different approaches to assessing an individual’s medical fitness for deployment. This guide offers frontline military physicians a rational, standardized and algorithmic approach to assessing medical fitness of individuals before deployment. If adopted as a STANAG, this guide could then be kept up-to-date through a process that allows nations to track individuals with known chronic disease who were deployed into a theatre of operations. This information, stripped of any patient-specific identifiers, could then be entered into a national and/or NATO database, allowing the guide to become increasingly evidence-based, and also more accurate in quantifying the risk of exacerbation based on individual and disease characteristics, as well as the nature and length of the deployment. This additional precision and degree of confidence will aid senior medical advisors and military commanders as they make the final decision on any given deployment situation.