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VA Will Improve Mental Health Care Program
The Department of Veterans Affairs has a plan to improve services for the more than half million veterans it treats for mental health illness. The VA's Undersecretary for Health Thomas Garthwaite described the plan at a conference held by the nonprofit organization the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. He started by saying he considers his Department's mental health program outstanding.
"The VA for many years has seen mental health as a normal part of all health care and has never tried to restrict benefits like has been done too often in the past in the private sector."
But, he says there's still lots of room for improvement. That's why the VA has begun collecting data to measure its own performance.
"We've tried to set up some very consistent guidelines of things we think should be done all the time. For instance we think that all patients should be asked about whether they're depressed or not and whether they're having a problem with alcohol and so forth."
He says by randomly pulling charts, the VA found it's screened 60 percent of vets for alcoholism so far this year and 62 percent for depression. Both are improvements from last year, but he says, there are inconsistencies at facilities across the county.
"What it means is that we have to have better training, better methods to remind clinicians, in their visits with patients, to do this, and better ways of rolling that data back up and feeding it to clinicians so they know they're improving."
The VA is also standardizing treatment protocol. Garthwaite says while he doesn't want to stomp on a practitioner's right to make choices, he won't let them practice bad medicine.
"When it was first known that antibiotics were good for ulcers there was a fairly long time between when it was first known and the science was very good and when it was universally applied in every doctor's office in every state in America. The same could be said in mental health. When there's an advance in anti-depression medication you have to teach every practitioner how to use it, when to use it. Getting that consistency in delivery takes a long time and what we'd like to do is shorten that time period."
He says, by monitoring itself the VA can learn how well it's delivering care and make adjustments accordingly.
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