Belvoir hospital, DVBIC partner to launch Brain Injury Awareness Month

Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, in partnership with the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, officially launched Brain Injury Awareness Month March 6 during an open house at the Intrepid Pavilion, reaffirming the ongoing commitment of both organizations to providing world-class TBI care to servicemembers.

March is Brain Injury Awareness Month, and the open house event highlighted several organizations and their efforts to prevent TBI as well as provide care to those servicemembers who have sustained a brain injury.

Since 2000, more than 294,000 servicemembers have sustained a traumatic brain injury, with about 80 percent occurring in the at home environment, according to Col. Sidney Hinds, II, DVBIC national director.

These numbers indicate the militarys role in supporting veterans, wounded warriors, and their Families, which becomes increasingly more important as the brain injury research advances.

Clearly, we are not going to stop seeing traumatic brain injuries even in times of no war, said Navy Capt. Jennifer Vedral-Baron, Belvoir hospital director. So that means despite any operations tempo, we have a lot of work to do, and that work continues daily.

Despite the increase in the numbers of TBI in both the military and the civilian population over the past decade, the ability to detect especially mild TBI and treat all forms of TBI are far from perfect, said Dr. Heechin Chae, the director of TBI National Intrepid Center of Excellence program at Fort Belvoir.

In coordination with their physical therapists and medical providers, wounded warriors partner as a team and actively evaluate and develop new ways to incorporate life elements into their treatment and recovery plans.

Gaining the trust of the wounded warriors who walk into this building with broken body, mind and spirit is a crucial first step in their journey to recovery, said Chae. Only then, our highly trained clinicians can unlock the injured brain to tap into its healing potential to reach the best outcome.

Because of its unique clinical care model, providers are able to focus on both servicemembers and their Families while providing cutting edge evaluation and treatment plans, advanced research programs fully integrated into the clinical programs, education programs, long-term follow-up and continuity management in one central location the Intrepid Pavilion.

The Intrepid Pavilion, which served as a focal point of the event, was designed to help facilitate and standardize a single concept of care to enhance the discovery, refine the delivery and influence the culture of TBI treatment across the Department of Defense and among health care providers. The pavilion, also referred to as Intrepid Spirit One, was dedicated in September 2013. It is the operation center for the TBI National Intrepid Center of Excellence program at Fort Belvoir, which expects to treat as many as 600 patients in its first year at the new facility.

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Belvoir hospital, DVBIC partner to launch Brain Injury Awareness Month