Where does the US Navy send its doctors and nurses to train for treating gunshot wounds?

How do you prepare US Navy doctors for a war zone? Send them to a Chicago trauma unit.

A partnership with a Cook County hospital (Stroger Hospital) is allowing military medical personnel access to the trauma patients that it serves in Chicago, which is grappling with so much gun violence on its south and west sides that some people have taken to calling the city “Chiraq.”

Because the Navy doesn’t have any trauma training facilities in the U.S., military medical teams can’t get experience dealing with penetrating wounds, inserting IVs in emergencies and other techniques common to combat areas.

The John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County has one of the busiest trauma units in the county and offers unique training opportunities for doctors. “It’s important to get them this kind of training here, so they can see how to stop that bleeding and save that life,” Lt. Cmdr. Stan Hovell, a US Navy nurse who worked in a rotation at the hospital, told the Chicago Tribune. “They pick up those skills and carry it back to the Navy.”

Launched in spring of 2014, the program is one of two of its kind in the country. The other is at the Los Angeles County-University of South California Medical Center where the US Navy also sends hundreds of people for training.