| Last updated on 2008-09-09 14:09:09 |
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Military Service Organizations and Veterans Service Organizations
May 23,2006 Mr. DeNicola opened the meeting at 10:00 a.m. by welcoming the attendees. He answered a question from the last meeting concerning the sharing of a hospital between the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs at Great Lakes, Ill., replying that the decision was that the VA would own this hospital and that Vista medical records system would be used. Following Mr. DeNicola, Dr. (Col.) Bob Ireland gave a briefing on Suicide Prevention in the Department of Defense. He said that each Service has suicide prevention program managers and websites. He discussed the elements of effective suicide prevention. These included leadership involvement, incorporation into Professional Military Education, guidelines, how to use guidelines, community education and training, and an integrated delivery system of preventive services. He gave an example of an interactive scenario-based method to explain suicide risk factors and what to do if someone exhibits those risk factors as an alternative to the traditional suicide prevention slide briefing. Dr. Ireland mentioned that the new Suicide Rate Standardization Work Group had been established because the different Services counted different people as suicides, thus a comparison of suicide rates between the Services was meaningless. To remedy this, the Work Group was standardizing statistics back to 2001. Its data found no significant difference between the Services and no significant differences across the years. Despite media reports to the contrary, the Army had no significant increase in suicides in 2005. It was probable that the civilian community, for a variety of reasons, was underestimating the number of suicides by perhaps as much as 35%. Unlike the civilian community, DoD was counting suspected suicides, even if unconfirmed as suicides. Even with the civilian underestimation, the DoD suicide rate was still less than half of the civilian rate. Dr. Ireland said that the suicide risk factors for someone in a combat zone were the same as for someone at home except that there was a greater availability of weapons in the combat zone. Dr. Ireland said that one support tool available was the screening available via online programs like MilitaryOneSource; however, he cautioned that "you don't just jump from a check box to a mental health provider." He concluded his briefing with a discussion of the Mental Health Support and Deployment Cycle and then responded to questions from the attendees. In response to whether we were sending stressed-out troops back into action, he said that this issue was being studied but DoD policy was that we expect servicemembers to be fully functional when they re-deploy. That may mean that they are on medication, that they may have symptoms or that they may be in PTSD-remission. Dr. (Col.) Tony Carter followed Dr. Ireland. Dr. Carter briefed on Acute Injury Care Research. He presented statistics showing that while the percentage of those Killed in Action had been halved (25% to 12.5%) from World War II to today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the percentage of those who Died of Wounds had gone up slightly (3.5% to 4.1%). The reason why was that due to improved medical evacuation, those mortally wounded were making it to the hospital before dying instead of dying on the battlefield. Additional research found that the highest number of battle injuries was because of explosions and that IED's were the most common cause of those explosions. The most common type of injuries was to the extremities because those areas of the body are not covered by body armor. Dr. Carter said that in a study done of 400 deaths, some 85 lives could have been saved if something different had been done. What can be done to enhance survivability, he asked. He then answered that question by discussing a variety of changes and improvements being made as a result of lessons learned in the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. These include changes to training, the greater availability of tourniquets and the use of Quick Clot powder, and better coordination to get patients to the right facility to treat a specific type of wound. He concluded by saying that an area to be considered as the military enhances its ability to deal with acute wartime injuries is the transferability of these lessons learned to a civilian situation, such as injuries resulting from a terrorist act. Mr. DeNicola ended the roundtable by mentioning that "Deployment Quarterly" is changing its name to "Force Health Protection" and that the subject of an article in the renamed publication on Computer Accommodation will also be the subject to be briefed at the next roundtable. The next VSO/MSO roundtable meeting will be held Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 1000 a.m.
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