Summit: 'As Good As It Gets' Not Good Enough, Speakers Say

  • Published
  • By Myron J. Goodman
  • DCoE Public Affairs
09/14/2015 --  A top Pentagon official hammered home the message of the 2015 Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury Summit: providers need to continue improving treatment for psychological health and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

"We need to continue to push the boundaries of what we know now," said Dr. Karen S. Guice, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, to 1,750 live and virtual conference registrants. "Look into that next approach, that next better treatment, that next better protocol that gives us a better outcome."

Guice also emphasized that providers need to keep themselves healthy in order to properly care for service members.

"If I do not have you whole and healthy, neither do your patients," Guice said. (Providers: Check out the Provider Resilience mobile app from the National Center for Telehealth and Technology, created to help reduce compassion fatigue and burnout.)

The need to find better ways to treat patients with psychological health or TBI challenges is the continued driving message of the conference. Although the level of care has continued to rise since DCoE was founded in 2007, speaker after speaker emphasized that these achievements are not enough.

In particular, they discussed the need for providers and medical systems to follow through with patients as they transition from one stage in their treatment or career to another. The goal of the conference, titled "Continuum of Care and Care Transitions in the Military Health System," is to identify areas of opportunity and best practices that will help tighten some of the loose ends that prevent service members from getting the care they need.

"We know that across many of these transitions there is that vulnerability of being lost in the cracks, not having that continuity," Navy Capt. Anthony Arita, director of Deployment Health Clinical Center, said yesterday in an interview. "So this conference is designed to focus on those transition points."

Care has come a long way from where it was before 9/11, but it is not where it needs to be yet, Army Maj. General (Dr.) Brian C. Lein, commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and Fort Detrick, said yesterday. He reminded the audience of the 1997 film "As Good as It Gets," whose message was that sometimes the status quo is all anyone can achieve. Military medical care can't accept the status quo, he said.

"It is a message to our health care providers. It is a message to our leaders," Lein said. "We must break through 'as good as it gets.'"

Air Force Lt. Gen. (Dr.) Douglas A. Robb, director of the Defense Health Agency, demonstrated his passion for psychological health and TBI in his welcoming remarks. He echoed Lein's point. 

"We need to continue to push the envelope," Robb said. "'As good as it gets' is not good enough."