Quote:
Originally Posted by Oerets
The VA has special needs patients that require a staff with experience in battlefield injuries. So I think keep the VA is the best way to keep the skills where they are needed. Now for general medical yes but for the injuries requiring more specialized care no to going outsourced.
Barney
|
I'm not buying it for a second Barney. Civilians are shot up every day. Civilians are injured in explosions every day. Civilians are injured in fixed wing aircraft and helicopter accidents every day. Civilians are ripped up by heavy manufacturing equipment and farm equipment every day. Trauma injury is trauma injury. Surgeons and speci@lists in trauma treatment abound. Medium sized and big city trauma centers see the same sorts of injuries day in and day out as seen in combat support field hospitals. Military personnel can be airlifted to civilian trauma centers for treatment just like civilians are when they have catastrophic injuries. There's no place I'd rather go with a catastrophic injury than the Level II trauma center at Mission St. Joseph's in Asheville, NC...a town with under 90,000 residents in a metropolitan area with under 500,000 residents.
But where the VA system purely sucks is in it's treatment of mental health problems, particularly single incident trauma (critical incident debriefing treatment) and complex trauma (chronic PTSD treatment). There is tremendous pressure on VA docs to put a band-aid on somebody's forehead and approve them for re-deployment. There's probably nothing that can be done outside of civilian oversight of domestic VA locations and combat support field hospital facilities overseas. Which isn't going to happen. But the way military victims of combat related PTSD are treated in military facilities is a fucking disgrace. Civilian psychiatrists, civilian psychologists, and civilian licensed mental health professionals need to protect military personnel from the stop-loss bullshit going on at the VA and at field hospitals in deployment areas.