Minor Behavioral Health Readiness and Profiling Barriers in the U.S. Army

Medical readiness for deployment is arguably the most important component of personnel readiness in the U.S. Army. Administrative documents called profiles provide individualized medical recommendations to the commander regarding how to best provide for a soldier's health and welfare, and contribute to an aggregated enumeration of a unit's overall readiness to deploy. Profiles that convey behavioral health (BH) limitations thus reflect what can be called the "behavioral health readiness" of the force. In the Army, BH profiles are further broken into major (more severe BH conditions) and minor (less severe) categories. Recent reporting indicates that current profiling (both major and minor) substantially underestimates BH readiness, presenting a significant safety and personnel issue for the Army. Currently, little is understood regarding barriers to profiling. The intent of this paper is to establish a basis for understanding these barriers by examining provider perceptions on the issue. While the results may have broad applicability in determining BH profiling barriers in general, minor BH improvement efforts stand to benefit the most due to more reliance on provider judgment and less on mandatory guidelines.

Selected themes and provider quotes regarding barriers to BH profiling from a qualitative study, "Return to Duty Practices of Behavioral Healthcare Providers in Garrison," are presented. Fourteen semi-structured interviews and three focus groups were conducted with a diverse convenience sample of Army BH providers in October 2015, resulting in input from 29 practitioners.

Four general profiling barrier categories were identified and include provider proficiency level, environmental factors, stigma concern, and clinical time constraints.

Suboptimal BH profiling rates suggest that a preponderance of factors currently tip the scale of BH profiling in a lopsided fashion that comes at the cost of soldier safety and increased risk of mission failure. Relief from one or more of the identified profiling barriers would likely be necessary to tip the scale of clinical judgment in favor of increased profiling, and may be more beneficial for improving minor BH profiling deficits in particular. Quantitative exploration of provider and soldier attitudes on this subject is worthy of further pursuit and would shed light on which of the identified barriers are most crucial to reducing BH profile deficits.