About 120 service members and veterans who have suffered traumatic combat wounds that require lifelong care have begun to see the benefits of having a federal recovery coordinator assigned to help them.
The coordinators are still few in number. For people recently wounded catastrophically, they coordinate their care, their rehabilitation and their reintegration into society even if that difficult process lasts a lifetime.
Sarah Wade, wife of retired Army Sgt. Ted Wade, who lost an arm and suffered traumatic brain injury in combat four years ago, said their coordinator is removing the bureaucratic hassles.
“One of the nice things is everything is their jurisdiction,” said Sarah Wade. Often since her husband was wounded, issues had popped up related to his condition, or to the challenges the Wades faced as a family, and they didn’t know who to contact, she said.
“We had so many different people that a lot of time I didn’t know who to go to for what, or sometimes there would be gaps where pretty much what I was hearing across the board was ‘That’s not in my jurisdiction.’ “
The person Sarah Wade calls now is Daniel Bence at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center.
“Like all of the federal recovery coordinators, my patients vary in injuries, from traumatic brain injury to amputations to burns to blindness to post-traumatic stress disorder,” Bence said. Adding later, “We are lifelong partners to the catastrophically disabled.”
Bence already had worked 33 years for the VA, and become an expert on blind rehabilitation before he became a coordinator. His expertise now is shared with other helpers whose severely wounded patients have visual impairments.
Judy Hamrick, a family nurse practitioner and Navy veteran, also is a coordinator at Bethesda. She was in the first small group trained for the program.
Initial turnover was high, Sarah Wade recalled.
Now Hamrick and Bence each have about 20 patients. Some of them live far away from Bethesda but the coordinators still track and facilitate their care.
The Wades, who have moved from North Carolina to a home near Bethesda, took time recently to count how many case managers of one kind or another Ted has had since being severely wounded by an improvised explosive device in February 2004. Their answer: 21.
The first eight coordinators were located at major military and VA medical centers: Bethesda, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego and VA centers in Rhode Island and Houston.
Their initial focus was to enroll the catastrophically injured among newly evacuated patients from Iraq and Afghanistan. Referrals are made off manifest lists or referred by a command, a case manager or the multi-disciplinary medical team treating patients at a military or VA facility.
People also can self-refer to a coordinator, and the program is “developing a process to reach back to those who passed through the system prior to the program’s creation,” Guice said. Until that is set, severely injured or their families can seek a referral through a military or VA health facility.
There they should contact a VA liaison officer, wounded warrior program personnel or the Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom team.
“Anyone referred to us, even though their injury was at the beginning of the war … we don’t turn away,” said Hamrick. “We’re going to evaluate them and get them the service they need, whether they fit into our program or not. We’re going to refer them to someone who can help.”
One of her recent patients was a Navy veteran released a few years ago. Traumatic brain injury had gone undetected until his wife reported his deteriorating behavior, including sleep loss, panic attacks and finally seizures.
“She was working through their case manager, and the case manager contacted me. That’s how he got in the program. He’s now receiving the care he needs,” Hamrick said.
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