Collective Protection (COLPRO) supports all roles of care providing respiratory, percutaneous, and ocular protection in an area or shelter which eliminates the need to don individual protective equipment. COLPRO material solutions range from fixed site filtration systems, to shelter liners and filtration systems for tentage in an expeditionary setting, and finally highly mobile vehicle-mounted and decontaminable shelters which can be erected within minutes and allow for the fast-paced aggregation/disaggregation necessary for medical force elements to keep pace with the units they support in the forward area. All of these COLPRO capabilities allow time to accomplish uninterrupted, on-going damage control surgeries/damage control resuscitation of patients undergoing surgical procedures at the onset of the CBR attack, allowing time for evacuation, and ensuring contamination survivability for low density, high value equipment and on-hand medical logistics supplies.8,9
Collective protection is also instrumental in supporting the gap for prolonged care in a CBRN environment. Beyond CBR environments, COLPRO can provide elemental protection and environmental control to MTFs in a variety of climates and terrains, which may mitigate some of the related challenges. COLPRO regulates temperature and humidity, which increases medical provider endurance and improves patient outcomes, and COLPRO filtration removes pathogens from the air. These characteristics would be beneficial in any operating environment, including LSCO environments, and could also enable better clinical outcomes in prolonged care situations.