Better Care for Vets

The President’s Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors yesterday recommended major changes to the care and treatment of service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The commission is calling for “fundamental change” to the poor treatment and numbing bureaucracy our vets must endure on the road to recovery.

During the last few months the commissioners comprised of “health care, disability, and housing experts, injured service members, and family” members “have have visited 23 Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and private-sector treatment facilities.” They’ve also interviewed injured service members and their families, health care professionals and managers of military and veterans’ programs. Additionally, “[m]ore than 1,700 injured service members responded to a national survey” … and they “received more than 1,250 letters and emails from service members, veterans, family members, and health care personnel.”

The commission emphasized the “overall high quality of our military’s battlefield medicine and the care delivered in our nation’s military medical facilities.” However, in providing comprehensive health care for our vets said the U.S. must move beyond “patching the system” and apply “a sense of urgency and strong leadership” to create a system focused on the needs of individual patients: “The tendency to make systems too complex and rule-bound must be countered by a new perspective, grounded in an understanding of the importance of patient-centeredness.”

The commission recognized that

“Despite accomplishments in clinical care, problems do occur—particularly in handoffs between inpatient and outpatient care and between the two separate DoD and VA health care and disability systems.”

and to resolve these problems, the commission focused on better ways to

• Serve the multiple needs of injured service members and their families
• Support them in their recovery and return to military duty or to their communities and
• Simplify the delivery of medical care and disability programs.

To achieve these improvements, the commission’s report makes 35 recommendations that can be accomplished in 6 steps:

1. Immediately Create Comprehensive Recovery Plans to Provide the Right Care and Support at the Right Time in the Right Place. Specific goals: ensure an efficient, effective and smooth rehabilitation and transition back to military duty or civilian life; establish a single point of contact for patients and families; and eliminate delays and gaps in treatment and services.
2. Completely Restructure the Disability and Compensation Systems. Specific goals: Update and simplify the disability determination and compensation system; eliminate parallel activities; reduce inequities; and provide a solid base for the return of injured veterans to productive lives.
3. Aggressively Prevent and Treat Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury. Specific goals: Improve care of two common conditions of the current conflicts and reduce the stigma of post traumatic stress disorder; mentally and physically fit service members will strengthen our military into the future.
4. Significantly Strengthen Support for Families. Specific goals: Strengthen family support systems and improve the quality of life for families.
5. Rapidly Transfer Patient Information Between DoD and VA. Specific goals: Support a patient-centered system of care and efficient practices.
6. Strongly Support Walter Reed By Recruiting and Retaining First-Rate Professionals Through 2011. Specific goals: Assure that this major military medical center has professional and administrative staff necessary for state-of-the art medical care and scientific research through 2011.

Implementating the commission’s recommendations will take the combined efforts of the President, Congress, the DoD, the VA and other organizations such as the Public Health Service. However, according to Donna Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services and a co-chairman of the commission, says the President can implement 29 of the 35 recommendations without any legislation whatsoever.