The Rocky Road from the Military to the VA

While serving in the military, few think about what comes next. What happens if you are injured and the physical, mental, emotional damage does not go away? Who is tasked to make you “whole” again through health care and compensation? It is a process with which most civilians, and many service members and their families have little familiarity. It is cumbersome, and starts when the individual is still in the service, with a transition program and virtually no follow up by the military. For the last twenty years, the Department of Labor (DOL) Veterans Employment and Training Services (VETS) has provided grants to the National Veterans Training Institute (NVTI), which operates within the University of Colorado at Denver (UCD) to develop and implement training programs for the Department of Defense (DOD) to provide transition information to active duty personnel before they leave the military. To keep it simple, they titled the training “Transition Assistance Program (TAP) and taught the material to DOD personnel in a “train the trainer” model. While the intent and objectives were clear, and the benefits to military personnel enormous, implementation and utilization of the training was and continues to be inconsistent. For example, a woman in an Army unit in Germany may benefit from a comprehensive transition assistance program beginning six months before she is due to rotate back to the states and process out of the service. Another woman at a base in the US may get a...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs