Battlefield medicine rests on a truth that military health services have known for a century and planning systems regularly forget: a casualty’s survival is decided by the first minutes and by the efficiency of the evacuation chain, not by the equipment of the destination hospital. The war in Ukraine has been a painful reminder. When air superiority is contested and drones observe the entire frontline zone, the classic model of medical evacuation stops working in its traditional form.
The panel’s scope covers battlefield medicine and first-aid training at the sub-unit level, the organisation of medical evacuation under threat, the supply of blood and blood products — which becomes a bottleneck under mass casualties — and field hospitals and their real throughput.
The civilian system is the other half of this conversation, because it is the one that would receive most of the wounded and would have to operate under crisis conditions. We ask about hospitals’ capacity to surge admissions, about stockpiles, about staff, and about whether cooperation plans between the defence ministry and the healthcare system have been exercised or exist only on paper.
That leaves long-term care for the wounded and for veterans — the area that appears in the Polish debate least often, yet determines readiness to serve and trust in the state. How do we build these capabilities in advance, when each of them takes years rather than months?