Assessing the Capacity of the DoD Psychological Health System

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) strives to maintain a physically and psychologically healthy, mission-ready force, and the care provided by the Military Health System (MHS) is critical to meeting this goal. Given the rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) among U.S. service members, attention has been directed to ensuring the quality and availability of programs and services targeting these and other psychological health conditions. Understanding the capacity of the MHS and its providers to deliver high-quality care for PTSD and MDD is an important step in support of future efforts to improve care across the MHS.

DoD's Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, now called the Psychological Health Center of Excellence, asked RAND to conduct an assessment of the capacity of the MHS to deliver evidence-based care for PTSD and MDD and to recommend areas in which the MHS could focus its efforts to continuously improve the quality of care provided to all service members. As part of this project, RAND fielded a survey of DoD's behavioral health providers. We thank the providers who participated in this survey.

The final report:

1. provides an overview of the psychological health (PH) workforce at military treatment facilities (MTFs),
2. describes the extent to which PH providers within MTFs report delivering guideline-concordant care for PTSD and MDD,
3. identifies facilitators and barriers to providing this care, and
4. provides recommendations to increase the use and monitoring of guideline-concordant care for PTSD and MDD.

The final report (available for download on this site) complements other RAND studies that have examined administrative data and medical records of service members diagnosed with PTSD or depression to assess the types of care they actually received.