Panelist Biographies
defi cit, a diffi culty moving, or a cognitive defi cit, which
[causes] diffi culty with thinking [and] problems with emo- Meredith Beck is the national policy director for the
tional response, behavioral diffi culties, and so on. Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofi t group created
Moderate brain injuries are somewhere in between. about fi ve years ago to support injured servicemembers.
[There are approximately] 2 million [TBIs] in the civil- In that capacity, Beck talks to servicemembers and their
ian sector [and] more than 90 percent are mild brain families to ascertain their needs and writes policy pro-
injuries or concussions. posals based on what they have experienced.
I think what you’re dealing with in theater is the dif-
fi culty of identifi cation and fi guring out whether some- Col. Peter Bunce, USAF-Ret., has a son who was se-
body has had a concussion, and whether they need to verely wounded in March 2004 in the al-Anbar Province
be relieved of duties at least until they get better. That’s in his second tour with the U.S. Marine Corps. Bunce
the purpose of having some sort of pre-morbid screen. has experienced fi rsthand the diffi culty of navigating
transition benefi ts and the VA system.
Connors: Ms. Beck, I wanted to talk for just a minute
about ... how diffi cult it might be to return to work [and] Susan Connors (moderator) is the CEO of the Brain
whether it’s to return to duty or to return in the civilian Injury Association of America, a 25-year-old advocacy
sector. How important [are] vocational rehabilitation, sup- organization founded by individuals with brain injury,
ported employment, compensated work therapy for the their family members, researchers, and physicians.
long-term outcome of returning servicemembers? Do you
see compensated work therapy as a good way to provide Cmdr. Richard Jadick, USN, is currently a resident
ongoing or maintenance rehabilitation? at the Medical College of Georgia studying urology. In
2004, he was part of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines in
Meredith Beck: Compensated work therapy or vocation- the push through Fallujah, Iraq. He also is the author of
al rehabilitation, those are prime examples of benefi ts On Call in Hell.
that are currently in existence that can be leveraged to
benefi t servicemembers with TBI. Dr. Thomas Gualtieri is a physician and the medical
I [have] said, ‘Stop the benefi ts for a second, stop director of the North Carolina Neuropsychiatry Clinic in
adding.’ I know people are well-intentioned, but what Chapel Hill and Charlotte.
we’ve been doing is adding benefi ts on top of one an-
other, whether it’s having the [Defense and Veterans
Brain Injury Center] (DVBIC) on top of the private Col. Peter Bunce, USAF-Ret.: Well, as every brain injury is
sector, on top of the centers of excellence, on top of the different, each situation is extremely complex, and [there
polytrauma centers, on top of all of these things, or on are] a lot of options available for families. Again, there are
the benefi t side adding employment benefi ts and these so many programs available, but you need to have options
types of things. Instead of benefi ting the servicemem- that fi t the [family’s] fi nancial [and] time situations to be
ber, it confuses them so they can’t actually access the able to make it work.
benefi t itself. If you look at just the deluge of paperwork that comes
We’ve created this great system where we have so many to you from the VA in any one week, it is daunting. For
benefi ts, and I think Sen. Bob Dole actually has touched me to be able to do my job and my wife to be able to do
on this before. We don’t have a problem now where we [her] job to afford the resources to try [and] help my son
have too few benefi ts in most cases. ... But [we need to be] rehabilitate, we’ve got to be able to do our jobs, and not
careful about how we add them on top of one another. have to be handling all the paperwork that’s coming in.
All this paperwork is addressed to my son, who has a
Connors: I’ll just open this to the fl oor. What can or what brain injury, who doesn’t understand any of it. And this in-
should DoD or the VA do for family caregivers of return- dividual has now been in the VA system about a year. They
ing servicemembers? How important — you learned to fi nally have done some analysis and determined that now
navigate the benefi t system, if you will, on your own — how he’s not mentally competent to handle his own fi nances.
important do you think education and training is for fam- So yesterday I got a letter that said they’re cutting off
ily members whose loved ones have mild, moderate, and his benefi ts because he’s not able to handle them, and of
severe TBI respectively? course over the last year, I’ve been trying to train him to
And what do you think is the most effective way to make handle his own money and working with him. So now it’s
sure family members get the training they need? just another thing that we deal with.
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