Tactical Combat Casualty Care

Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC or TC3), formerly known as Self Aid Buddy Care,^[1] is a set of guidelines for trauma life support in prehospital combat medicine published by the United States Defense Health Agency. They are designed to reduce preventable deaths while maintaining operational success. The TCCC guidelines are routinely updated and published by the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care (CoTCCC), which is part of the Defense Committees on Trauma (DCoT) division of the Defense Health Agency (DHA).^[2] TCCC was designed in the 1990s for the Special Operations Command medical community. Originally a joint Naval Special Warfare Command and Special Operations Medical Research & Development initiative, CoTCCC developed combat-appropriate and evidence-based trauma care based on injury patterns of previous conflicts. The original TCCC corpus was published in a Military Medicine supplement in 1996.^[3] TCCC has since become a Department of Defense (DoD) course, conducted by National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians.^[4]