The Department of Defense says it's trying finalize its 2008 plans for ensuring top quality healthcare for all service members and beneficiaries.
Noticeably left out of that declaration is any discussion of mental health - despite the fact that thousands of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to develop symptoms for post-traumatic stress disorder within the next decade.
"Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Gates charged me with being the guarantor of quality healthcare for service members, retirees and their families," said Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. "Quality healthcare is the Secretary's top goal, apart from the war itself."
The DOD first discussed its "MHS Strategic Plan" at a Washington D.C. conference in January. All of the presentations for the conference were aligned with the plan's goals and objectives, Pentagon officials said, including:
- Enhance deployable medical capability, force medical readiness and homeland defense ,including humanitarian missions;
Sustain the military health benefit through top quality patient-centered care and long-term patient partnerships with a focus on prevention;- Provide globally accessible, real time, health information that enables medical surveillance and evidence-based health care;
- Provide incentives to achieve quality in everything;
- Build and sustain the best hospitals and clinics; nurture a caring environment.
"The conference agenda is ambitious," Casscells said. "But it's the right event at the right time to energize our commitment to quality care throughout the entire enterprise."
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Statement of S. Ward Casscells, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, before the House of Representatives Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, March 14, 2008. http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/MilPers031408/Casscells_Testimony031408.pdf
It will be interesting to see if the promises which are currently being made for military mental health services become the reality. It doesn't take much of an institutional memory to realize that few of those issues consistently identified in the Final Report of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, Carter Commission on Mental Health, the Surgeon General's Reports, and the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health have been systemically addressed. We have passed through successive of eras which provided little more than catchy shiboleths, ex. The Era of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, The Era of Evidence Based Practices, The Era of Recovery and The Era of Wellness. Each era resulted in a plethora of conferences, symposiums, and scholarly articles and the assurances that this latest era unlike those which preceded it was to be an era of implementation. (It should be noted that despite all the earlier eras and promises that the members of the President's New Freedom Commission were united in their belief that America's mental health delivery system is in shambles.)
Perhaps, the military mental health system will be the place where the words and deeds intersect but it does not bode well in that the final plan does not deal mental health. Words alone are never enough when the pain is so real.
VA closes psychiatric after 4th patient kills himself (April 15, 2008) Linked at: Article.
Sadly, a change in the fixtures and furnishings is never enough for it fails to address the underlying issues. It is a tragedy that few reporters ever ask about the nature, extent, timing, quality, and the appropriateness of the care provided at inpatient psychiatric facilities or the outcomes it engenders even after suicides.
Too often inpatient treatment in its entirety is meds, beds and milieu with a few desultory groups tossed in rather than the standard of care we would expect at a hospital. Sometimes, psychiatric hospital is simply an oxymoron. Perhaps, this was the case at Dallas VA well after Walter Reed temporarily focused attention on the military mental health system.
Women mental health is mostly caused during the depression and the unplanned pregnancy.. And the use of drug also affected the mental illness.
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rosesmith
Washington Alcohol Addiction Treatment
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