# Trauma Czar Col Valerie Sams, MD on Skill Sustainment, Clinical Readiness, and Optimizing the Military Health System

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/wardocs-the-military-medicine-podcast-4055206/trauma-czar-col-valerie-sams-md-on-skill-sustainment-clinical-readiness-and-optimizing-the-military-health-system
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/wardocs-the-military-medicine-podcast-4055206/trauma-czar-col-valerie-sams-md-on-skill-sustainment-clinical-readiness-and-optimizing-the-military-health-system.md
Podcast: [WarDocs - The Military Medicine Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/wardocs-the-military-medicine-podcast-4055206)
Published: 2026-05-27T11:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://wardocspodcast.podbean.com/e/trauma-czar-col-valerie-sams-md-on-skill-sustainment-clinical-readiness-and-optimizing-the-military-health-system/
Audio file: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/9kfsgpbmpngq29gx/wdr_0103_sams_full_audio75g5p.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/wardocs-the-military-medicine-podcast-4055206/episodes/trauma-czar-col-valerie-sams-md-on-skill-sustainment-clinical-readiness-and-optimizing-the-military-health-system
Duration seconds: 3397

## Resource

Col Valerie Sams, MD is an Air Force trauma surgeon, surgical critical care expert, and the Director of the Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills (C-STARS) at the University of Cincinnati. Her path to the operating room was anything but ordinary. Before medical school, she served as an Air Force line officer in logistics and fuels, learning how the operational side of the service actually works at the flight line. That bilingual fluency in operations and medicine now shapes how she advocates for resources, leads hospitals, and prepares the military health system for the next fight. In this conversation, she walks through her two tours as the trauma czar at the Bagram role three hospital straight out of fellowship, where she was responsible not only for clinical excellence but for leading every nurse, emergency medicine physician, and surgeon doing trauma care across the theater. She talks honestly about the weight of that role, especially during her second deployment with junior surgeons on their first downrange experience, the rise in U.S. casualties, the green-on-blue threat, and her work standing up Medic-X as a force multiplier for limited deployed medical crews. Col Sams makes a powerful case for the strategic importance of military-civilian partnerships like C-STARS, the only Air Force critical care air transport advanced training course, and explains how the Air Force, Army, and Navy are converging through the Joint Trauma System, the Mission Zero Act, and the American College of Surgeons Blue Book to professionalize military-civilian integration. She is direct about the skill sustainment crisis inside military treatment facilities, the shift from 65 percent beneficiary care to 20 percent, the urgency of the Military Unique Curriculum, and the ne…

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