Trends in Surgical Volume in the Military Health System—A Potential Threat to Mission Readiness

Abstract

The Military Health System (MHS) is tasked with a dual mission both to provide medical services for covered patients and to ensure that its active duty medical personnel maintain readiness for deployment. Knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSA) is a metric evaluating the transferrable skills incorporated into a given surgery or medical procedure that are most relevant for surgeons deployed to a theatre of war. Procedures carrying a high KSA value are those utilizing skills with high relevance for maintaining deployment readiness. Given ongoing concerns regarding surgical volumes at MTFs and the potential adverse impact on military surgeon mission readiness were high-value surgeries to be lost to the civilian sector, we evaluated trends in the setting of high-value surgeries for beneficiaries within the MHS.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2021
Source ID
10.1093/milmed/usaa543

Entities

People

  • Austin Haag
  • David F. Friedlander
  • Eugene Cone
  • Jolene Wun
  • Junaid Nabi
  • Maya Marchese
  • Peter Herzog
  • Quoc-Dien Trinh
  • Samuel Lyon

Organizations

  • Defense Health Agency
  • Harvard Medical School
  • Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Medicine

Readers

  • Instructional Design and Training Evaluation.
  • Medical or Health Care Field.
  • Military Mobilization and Reserve Forces Studies.