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West Coast combat casualty center opens

SAN DIEGO — Navy medical officials Monday formally unveiled the military’s newest West Coast facility specially designed to treat and rehabilitate combat-injured or ill patients evacuated from a war zone.

The $4.4 million, 30,000-square-foot facility, the Comprehensive Combat and Complex Casualty Care center, is located at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. It combines inpatient care and outpatient recovery and rehabilitative services.

The C5 facility “represents the Medical Center’s commitment to providing quality care and support to recovering service members and their families,” Rear Adm. Christine S. Hunter, the medical center and Navy Medicine-West commander, said in a statement. “The C5 program is at the forefront of wounded warrior care, and our health care team is inspired every day by the courage, energy and determination of the patients we serve.”

The center, which includes a large multiterrain obstacle course and climbing wall, offers recreational and therapeutic programs and a high-tech bionics laboratory. It is designed to help wounded service members, including amputees who have been outfitted with prosthetic limbs, transition to the normalcy of life. An on-site model apartment, fully equipped and furnished, is designed to help them learn everyday needs such as cooking a meal or maneuvering through furnishings.

The San Diego medical center last year shifted to a system of centralized case management that’s designed to treat and care for each patient through rehabilitation and transition back to military duty or into civilian life. It also opened an amputee center, staffed by specialists in prosthetics, and has expanded support programs for a wounded service member’s family.