National Guard Outreach and Linkage to Treatment

This project will add an evaluation/research component to an existing peer outreach program, now implemented for over 1100 soldiers in the Michigan Army National Guard. Preliminary work will be completed in three areas. We will conduct semi-structured interviews with soldiers, Buddies, and National Guard leadership and develop and pilot test survey items relevant to implementation. Further, we will develop and pretest survey items relevant to determining soldier symptomatic and functional status. We will also conduct a small feasibility study, fielding the newly developed survey to a representative sample of recently returned National Guard members from Michigan and Indiana, to determine response rates and veteran willingness to allow access to linkable PDHA/PDHRA data and health services data. Finally, we will construct a merged, de-identified longitudinal dataset comprised of Post-Deployment Health Assessment and Reassessment data, Military Health System/TRICARE, and VA services data from National Guard soldiers in Michigan and comparison states of Indiana and Ohio. This will allow a longitudinal assessment of services initiation and retention for the entire Guard populations in these states.