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Innovative Practices for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury
The RAND Corporation is conducting a study to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of Department of Defense sponsored programs designed to support psychological health (PH) and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) among service personnel and their families. The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and TBI has asked RAND to conduct this study.
The recent increase in operational tempo and prolonged nature of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan come with a number of challenges for service members and their families. While most military personnel and their families cope well across the deployment cycle, many will also experience difficulties handling stress at some point. Some may suffer psychological problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or anxiety disorders. There is also growing concern about the incidence of TBI among service personnel, and increased efforts have been made to screen, identify, and refer service personnel who may have functional limitations related to a TBI.
Over the past several years, the Department has implemented numerous programs, interventions, and policies to address these issues. These programs address various components of biologic, psychological, and social influences on health, and include programs across the resilience-prevention-treatment continuum. However, there is no single resource for identifying these programs, and comparatively few have been evaluated to help understand which approaches are the most effective and worthy of future investment.
Project Phases:
This project will be carried out in four phases:
- Develop a comprehensive catalog, with taxonomy, of existing efforts and initiatives currently sponsored or run by DoD to support psychological health and TBI in each of the major areas of activity for DCoE: clinical care; education and training; prevention; and patient, family and community outreach.
- Develop an analytic framework and set of measures that can be used to monitor and evaluate program effectiveness, and identifying candidate efforts for pilot evaluations.
- Conduct independent evaluations of approximately 20 of the most promising programs/interventions that have not been evaluated to date.
- Create a toolkit of materials to support program evaluation, as well as disseminate findings and program materials to increase adoption of evidence based approaches.
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