VA's Vision for Preparedness
VA must provide high-quality, interdisciplinary, integrated care to combat veterans to ensure they recover their optimal health and reintegrate successfully into civilian society and postwar life. VA has developed effective strategies and approaches to serve needs of veterans returning home from war. During times of peace, as an essential part of our national infrastructure of preparedness, these capabilities for postdeployment care must be maintained and ready for activation. Preparing for future conflicts will entail understanding the potential environmental agent or toxic exposures service members may face in fields of combat and remaining abreast of advances in battlefield and military technology. Our postcombat care system must include collaborative relationships among VA, DoD, and other government and community agencies, and integrated records systems to identify and track emerging symptoms, illnesses, and injuries. The system must have training plans to educate VA and community providers on needs of returnees and appropriate screening tools to detect past physical and mental health issues in new contexts. VA's doors should remain open to service members and their families who are struggling with readjustment, and VA should have the capability of quickly putting together a national response that allows recovering veterans to transition seamlessly to civilian life and to do so closer to home. At the center of preparedness for war will be a population-based approach to health recovery that uses interdisciplinary teams for postcombat care.