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NEWS + NOTES
faculty Front-line Physician
By Kim Kowsky
Joshua Tobin, MD, knows what it’s like to serve on the
front lines of medicine — and battle. The assistant
professor of anesthesiology at the David Geffen School
of Medicine at UCLA and commander in the U.S. Navy
Reserve has been on his third overseas deployment,
this time serving as head of anesthesia/critical care
at the NATO Role 3 Multi-National Medical Unit (MMU)
hospital at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan.
Dr. Joshua Tobin has been deployed
in Afghanistan since November 2013.
“FaceTime makes the separation a
little easier,” he says of his time
away from home. “But honestly,
it’s very hard.”
Photo: U.S. Army Cpl. Clay Beyersdorfer
38 U MAGAZINE
The Role 3 MMU operates like an intensive care unit,
accommodating up to 15 patients with injuries ranging
from severe bone fractures to severe wounds and who
typically stay no more than 24 hours — long enough
to undergo surgery and become stabilized before an
air-transport team takes them to hospitals in Bagram,
Northern Afghanistan, or Germany to recover. “We’re
in a forward area, and we want to get the wounded out
of here as quickly as possible,” Dr. Tobin says.
Speaking via FaceTime over the Internet from his
office in Kandahar, Dr. Tobin appears comfortable
and relaxed in his military fatigues, despite the
12-hour time difference and his disappointment over
missing his daughter’s first communion earlier in
the day. Deployed in November 2013 and not due
to return home until the following September,
Dr. Tobin uses FaceTime to stay connected with his
wife, Nicole Tobin, MD, a pediatric infectious-disease
specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and
their three children, ages 10, 8 and 6.
“I send them postcards and little presents, and
they send me pictures that I put up in my room,” Dr.
Tobin says. “FaceTime makes the separation a little
easier, but honestly, it’s very hard — though probably
hardest on my wife because she has to work and take
care of three kids and a dog while I’m over here.”
A hardened structure with a roof, a floor, walls,
plumbing and electricity, the MMU where Dr. Tobin
works is “very different from Ronald Reagan UCLA
Medical Center, but it’s actually a nice facility,”
he says. “I’ve worked out of tents on forward
deployments, but here we have X-ray machines
and CT scanners. It’s not fully electronic like you’d
see back home, but it is pretty darn close.”
The MMU’s adaptable physicians make up for
whatever the hospital may lack in equipment. Earlier
this year, Dr. Tobin was among six medical-team
members who received a Romanian Medal of Honor
for the lifesaving treatment they provided a group
of Romanian soldiers severely wounded by an
improvised explosive device in March 2014.
Before coming to UCLA, in 2012, Dr. Tobin was
an assistant professor at the University of Maryland
School of Medicine’s R Adams Cowley Shock
Trauma Center. Previously, he was an attending
anesthesiologist at Santa Clara Valley Medical
Center in San Jose, California, and an affiliated
clinical instructor in anesthesiology at the Stanford
University School of Medicine.
The first member of his family to join the
military, Dr. Tobin was in his residency in
neurosurgery at the Medical College of Virginia
during 9/11, and in 2003 he joined the U.S. Air
Force Reserve. “When the war kicked off, I felt very
strong that we needed to have good people taking
care of our guys over there,” Dr. Tobin says. “Not
wanting to argue with my own logic, I said, ‘well, if
you feel that strong, you probably ought to join.’”
During the next seven years, Dr. Tobin served
as a flight surgeon for the 24th Special Tactics
Squadron, completing deployments in the Philippines
as team leader of a special-operations critical-care-
evacuation team and in Afghanistan as team leader
of a critical-care air-transport team that performed