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The Military Health System (MHS) uses partnerships with other government agencies and civilian health care organizations to stay on top of the latest techniques to heal warfighters and keep them ready for the fight. And those partnerships are helping civilian partners improve their methods of care, which, in turn, are shared back with the military.
“We’re trying to create a synergy where both parties will benefit,” said Air Force Col. Michael Paston, the director of program integration for the Health Affairs’ Health Readiness Policy and Oversight branch. “There’s a benefit in knowledge sharing and developing standards for best care practices.”
Paston said the idea for partnerships was born of necessity: As the military stretches limited resources further and further, it needs to gain efficiencies to maintain a high level of care even if budgets get smaller. He said a strategic partnership working group formed last year used gap analyses to locate holes in the system and scan the medical landscape to determine the best opportunities for partnership.
The Air Force’s Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills (C-STARS) programs represent a direct application of partnering. Military doctors are placed in civilian emergency rooms, often in teaching hospitals, to learn how those hospitals have refined battlefield medicine and made it more efficient. Said Paston, “In a civilian trauma center, our doctors might see six gunshot wounds in a night, many more than they would see now in an emergency room in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, our people are able to pass along logistics knowledge, such as air evacuations, to make civilian hospitals more responsive to those needs.”
Paston pointed to another example: MHS worked with the Mayo Clinic to improve readiness by making the clinic’s experience in trauma surgery training and medical simulation models available to military doctors to help sharpen their skills. Senior officials with the hospital recently visited DHA facilities in Falls Church, Virginia, and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The visit underscored DHA’s commitment to work with the civilian health community to bring the best medical care to both active duty service members and retirees, along with their families.
Working partnerships with other government agencies also help MHS maintain the good health of its beneficiaries. The National Prevention Council (NPC) is a health coalition of 20 federal departments, including MHS. During a May 4, 2015, NPC meeting at the Pentagon, Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, shared how the Department of Defense (DoD) medical community faces health challenges similar to those of other member constituencies, making partnerships vital to success. Also attending were U.S. Surgeon General Vice Adm. Vivek Murthy and various NPC partners. As host, DoD shared its overall approach to executing Operation Live Well (OLW), the National Prevention Strategy, and its test program, the Healthy Base Initiative. Now underway at 14 installations, the Healthy Base Initiative motivates active duty service members, their families, retirees and DoD civilians to exercise, eat healthier and reduce tobacco use.
Woodson appeared at the yearly Global Health Strategies for Security course about the military’s efforts related to global health engagement (GHE), such as the response to Ebola in West Africa. Woodson said engagement is a necessity and must be executed smarter; courses like this one were important for building relationships and acquiring knowledge.
Paston said on the ground in Africa, it became necessary for military doctors to create informal partnerships with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). “The NGOs don’t want to be formally tied to the U.S. military, and we respect that. We just worked together, giving them materials our logistics system could provide and gaining from their knowledge they had garnered from years of work on the ground. It was all informal to make sure everyone got better medical care.”
Paston said it all comes back to a circular pattern of how the military innovates a medical technique on the battlefield, then civilian hospitals learn from that innovation and then refine it and make it more efficient, and it comes back to make military medicine better.
“That’s the synergy. We help them, and they help us.”