VA SAYS MORE MONEY AVAILABLE TO HELP HOMELESS VETERANS

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT 
HUD, VA Announce More Funds to Help Homeless Veterans
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21, 2013 - The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs today announced the second round of HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing funding to local public housing agencies across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

The $7.8 million in added funding will provide housing and clinical services for 1,120 currently homeless veterans.

In May of this year, the two agencies announced $60 million in HUD-VASH vouchers.

The supportive housing assistance announced today is provided through the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) Program which combines rental assistance from HUD with case management and clinical services provided by VA. Since 2008, a total of 58,140 vouchers have been awarded and 43,371 formerly homeless veterans are currently in homes of their own because of HUD-VASH.

"Our nation's veterans have sacrificed and given up so much for our freedom," said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. "These vouchers are helping America end veterans' homelessness one veteran at a time until we see not one veteran living on the street. I look forward to continue working with Secretary Shinseki and the Department of Veterans Affairs to target assistance to our homeless veterans."

"These HUD-VASH vouchers are a vital tool in our effort to provide these brave men and women with the earned care and benefits that help them live productive, meaningful lives," said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki. "So long as a single veteran lives on our streets, we have work to do. But with the continued support of President Obama, Congress and our community partners, we will end homelessness among veterans."

HUD-VASH is a critical part of the Obama Administration's commitment to end Veteran and long-term chronic homelessness by 2015. "Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness," serves as a roadmap for how the federal government will work with state and local communities to confront the root causes of homelessness, especially among former servicemen and women. HUD's annual "point in time" estimate of the number of homeless persons and families for 2012 found that veteran homelessness fell by 7.2 percent, or 4,876 people, since January 2011, and by 17.2 percent since January 2009. On a single night in January 2012, 62,619 veterans were homeless.

The grants announced today are part of $75 million appropriated this year to support the housing needs of homeless veterans. Local public housing authorities provide rental assistance to homeless veterans while nearby VA medical centers offer supportive services and case management. This is the second round of the 2013 HUD-VASH funding. HUD expects to announce more HUD-VASH funding this year.

VA medical centers work closely with homeless veterans then refer them to public housing agencies for these vouchers, based upon a variety of factors, most importantly the duration of the homelessness and the need for longer-term, more-intensive support to obtain and maintain permanent housing. The HUD-VASH program includes both the rental assistance the voucher provides and the comprehensive case management that VA medical center staff provides.

Veterans participating in the HUD-VASH program rent privately owned housing and generally contribute no more than 30 percent of their income toward rent. VA offers eligible homeless veterans clinical and supportive services through its medical centers across the U.S., Guam and Puerto Rico.

THE MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH CONNECTION

FROM:  U.S. VETERANS ADMINISTRATION
Mental and Physical Health – A Critical Connection 
The Case for Integrated Care
May is Mental Health Month, a time VA dedicates to raising awareness of Veterans’ mental health conditions and focuses on the many programs VA has to help achieve mental wellness for all.

A workforce of over 20,000 VA staff caring for the mental health of America’s Veterans is scheduled to increase by another 1,900. See sidebar story.
The mission of VA’s Office of Mental Health Services is to maintain and improve the health and well-being of Veterans through excellence in health care, social services, education, and research.

It has long been recognized that mental health and physical health problems are interrelated components of overall health and are best treated in a coordinated care system. In 2007, VA formally began an initiative to assure that coordination takes place — integrated care is now present in almost every VA medical center and an increasing number of community based outpatient clinics.

According to Dr. Andrew Pomerantz, “There have been many calls for full integration of mental health into the rest of health care over a decade, beginning with the Surgeon General’s report in 1999 and later repeated by The Institute of Medicine, the New Freedom Commission, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and many others.”

Dr. Pomerantz is VA’s National Mental Health Director for Integrated Care. He works collaboratively with the National Primary Care Director for Integrated Care.
“One goal of integrated care is to elevate mental health care to the same level of urgency and intervention as other health conditions.”

The important context of integrated care recognizes several facts:
Primary care provides opportunities to screen for unrecognized mental illness. Without ready access to mental health care, these conditions are not always treated.

Many patients prefer treatment in primary care settings and are not willing to attend appointments in a mental health clinic.

An established relationship with a primary care team fosters engagement in treatment. Adding mental health experts to that team expands the reach of what can be accomplished without referral to mental health services.

Health conditions do not always neatly fall into “physical” and “mental health” categories. They are closely interrelated. Outcomes of many general health conditions can be improved if the psychological and behavioral problems are attended to.

As Dr. Pomerantz explains, “We have repeatedly found that once integrated care programs are implemented, more patients with mental illness receive effective treatment than when they were treated in separate systems.

“Integrated care programs offer same-day appointments while the patients are already in the primary care clinic. This eliminates the attrition we generally see when patients have to wait days or weeks for an appointment in another clinic. If a patient has to wait a month for a mental health appointment, there’s almost a 50% likelihood that he or she will either cancel it or not show up when the time comes.”

Elevating Mental Health Care
The objective is to integrate care for Veterans’ physical and mental health conditions, improve access and quality of care across the spectrum of illness severity, reduce the stigma often associated with seeking help for mental illness, and allow treatment in mental health specialty settings to focus on persons with more severe illnesses. This greatly enhances the effectiveness of mental health treatment for those with more serious mental illness.

One goal of integrated care is to elevate mental health care to the same level of urgency and intervention as other health conditions. It provides the expertise to assure that mental disorders are effectively treated.

Dr. Pomerantz describes how a Veteran with co-occurring disorders is helped by integrated care. “We know, for instance, that outcomes for patients with diabetes are improved when we pay as much attention to patients’ mood as we do to their blood sugar.”

He adds, “Primary care practitioners are a critical link in identifying and addressing mental disorders and have often been called the ‘de facto mental health system,’ since most people with mental illness never make it to specialty mental health care. Opportunities are missed to improve mental health and general medical outcomes when a mental illness is under-recognized or under-treated in primary care settings.

“Until the establishment of integrated care, such under-recognition and under-treatment were the norm in primary care, despite the best intentions of primary care providers.”

Discussion Website Lets Vets Share
One avenue of treatment is the benefit Veteran patients receive from talking about their situation with other Vets. A unique VA website lets Veterans share problems and solutions.

MakeTheConnection.net is a website where you will hear inspiring stories of strength and learn what has worked for other Veterans. You will discover positive steps you can take, all in the words of Veterans just like you.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides specialty inpatient and outpatient mental health services at its medical centers and community-based outpatient clinics. In addition, readjustment counseling services are available for Veterans and their families at Vet Centers across the nation. All mental health care provided by VHA supports recovery, striving to enable a person with mental health problems to live a meaningful life in their community and achieve their full potential.

THREE YEARS SINCE VIRTUAL LIFETIME ELECTRONIC RECORDS ANNOUNCEMENT

Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record Reaches 3rd Anniversary

It has been three years since President Obama announced the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) on April 9, 2009. VLER is a multi-faceted business and technology initiative that includes a portfolio of health, benefits, personnel, and administrative information sharing capabilities. It provides Veterans, Service members, their families, care-givers, and service providers with a single source of information for health and benefits in a way that is secure and is authorized by the Veteran or Service member. Access to electronic records and information is essential to modern health care delivery and the paperless administration of benefits. Standardized and secure exchange of information allows for unprecedented, seamless delivery of both health care and benefits for our nation’s Veterans and Service members.

As explained by President Obama, “When a member of the armed forces separates from the military, he or she will no longer have to walk paperwork from a [Defense Department] duty station to a local VA health center. Their electronic records will transition along with them and remain with them forever.”

More than 1.3 million Veterans and Service members use the VLEReBenefits portal to manage their Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (SGLI), obtain GI Bill Certificates of Eligibility, and access more than 40 capabilities made available via eBenefits.va.gov, with new capabilities being added to the eBenefits portal on a quarterly basis.
Implemented “Blue Button,” providing online self-service downloads for on-demand access to personal health information to 800k active users.
More than 2.5 million Veteran and Service member medical records have been shared via the VLER Bidirectional Health Information Exchange (BHIE) and Clinical Data Repository/Health Data Repository (CHDR) projects.
Tens of thousands of Veterans and Service members are already taking advantage of DoD and VA participation in the nationwide health information network being piloted at 12 sites across the country.
VLER has also impacted thousands of disabled Service members, including our most severely wounded, ill, and injured by automating information management and sharing between DoD and VA in support of the Federal Recovery Coordinator and Integrated Disability Evaluation System.
When VLER is fully implemented, all information needed to quickly and accurately provide services and benefits to our Veterans and Service members will be exchanged electronically and proactively, putting the right information in front of the right people at the right time for them to take action.
Check out the VLER home page for more information.
Joe Paiva is the executive director of the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER). He’s also a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.

VA WORKS ON PLEDGE TO END VETERAN HOMELESSNESS

FROM AMERICAN FORCES PRESS SERVICE

VA Makes Progress on Pledge to End Veteran Homelessness

By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 3, 2012 - The Veterans Affairs Department is making progress on its pledge to end homelessness among veterans, with a focus on getting all homeless veterans off the streets by 2015, VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki told American Forces Press Service.

Shinseki joined President Barack Obama in announcing the plan in November 2009, proclaiming that no veteran should ever have to be living on the streets.

VA is working toward that goal, Shinseki told Congress last month, reporting that the number of homeless veterans on a given night dropped from 76,300 in 2010 to about 67,500 in 2011. The next goal, he said, is to drive those numbers down to 35,000 by the end of fiscal 2013, and ultimately, to zero.

As Shinseki set out to transform VA after arriving in 2009, he made the homeless issue a top priority in getting to the bottom of what he viewed as an institutional problem.

"Homelessness among veterans was a demonstration to me that we didn't have all our programs knitted together," he said. "As good as we thought we were doing in health care and other benefits, ... we had people who were slipping through the gaps in our programs -- most visibly, the homeless."

Getting homeless veterans off the streets, particularly within such a tight timeline, would be the driving force in creating positive change throughout VA, he explained.

"If you say you are going to end homelessness, then you have to be good at everything else," he said. "If you declare to end it, you have to figure out all the pieces that contribute to it so you can begin solving the pieces in order for the whole to be solved."

That, he said, requires making sure VA is addressing the root causes behind homelessness.

It means more than simply getting veterans into school; it means making sure they graduate, he explained. It's not just sending them for vocational training; it's ensuring they finish the training and are postured to land a job.

"That's how you beat homelessness," Shinseki said. "It's not the front door. It's the back door. What did they gain out of the program?"

To support this effort, VA's budget request for fiscal 2013 includes nearly $1.4 billion for programs designed to prevent or end homelessness among veterans. This represents a 33 percent increase, or $333 million, over the 2012 funding level.

The additional funding will provide grants and technical assistance to community nonprofit organizations to maintain veterans and their families in current housing or get them quickly into new housing. It also will provide grants and per diem payments for community-based organizations offering transitional housing to 32,000 veterans.

Shinseki also plans to hire 200 coordinators to help homeless veterans with disability claims, housing problems, job and vocational opportunities and problems with the courts.

Since announcing his homeless initiative, Shinseki said, he's come to understand that dealing with homelessness is really a two-part challenge.

It's one thing to get homeless veterans physically off the streets in what he calls the "rescue" part of the challenge. Shinseki said he feels confident that this part of the mission to be completed by 2015, as promised.

But the less visible and more challenging part of the problem, he said, is addressing a population that's at risk of becoming homeless. These, Shinseki explained, are veterans who are "one paycheck, one mortgage payment, one more missed utility bill away from being evicted."

"We never see that. But if we are going to truly end homelessness, we have to have a better picture of [that]... and go into prevention mode," Shinseki said. "Otherwise, you will never be able to solve this."

So while he expects the rescue mission to wrap up in 2015, Shinseki said, he'll be able to dedicate more resources toward an ongoing prevention effort.

"If you don't stop this faucet, you never end homelessness," he said.

VA SAYS UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN AMONG VETERANS

The following excerpt is from the Veterans Affairs website:
Vet Unemployment Down, But Work Still RemainsMarch 9, 2012 by Alex Horton
The month of February brought some good news: The unemployment rate for Veterans of the Iraq and  Afghanistan era dropped to 7.6 percent, down from nearly twice that last year. In a watershed moment, the  Veteran unemployment rate has dipped below the general population, which is at 8.3 percent:

Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that more veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan era than ever before are working in the civilian sector, up nearly 220,000 since the end of 2011. Today, nearly 1.9 million of those veterans hold private sector jobs, a number expected to rise as more troops leave the military in coming years.
For all [generations of] veterans, the unemployment rate dropped to 7 percent in February, the lowest that mark has been since December 2008. Almost all of the increase in veteran employment came from the new jobs for post-9/11 veterans.

the numbers come at a time of an economic upswing, so it’s not a big surprise to see more Vets finding jobs alongside civilians. The concern of many has been that Veterans may be disadvantaged in the job hunt, which is something we’ve covered before. The numbers show a promising reverse of that idea, at least for the moment.
Of course, unemployment numbers can carry statistical errors, and Veterans make up a small pool of respondents to polls, which can make broad predictions difficult. As the Army Times reported early today, anomalies are possible. However, the numbers have dropped consistently since December, not just this month.
Good news sometimes comes with a caveat, and for Veteran unemployment, it’s this: Even if the number is accurate, it’s still too high. We have highly trained, motivated, and disciplined folks rotating out of the military, ready for the next challenge, only to land in the unemployment line.
VA has committed to continue increasing Veteran employment in our own workforce, and employs over 100,000 Veterans today. VA has also put on hiring fairs for Vets to find both private and public sector jobs and hosts an annual conference for Veteran business owners, The White House has tackled the issue with its plan for aVeterans Job Corps and many promising initiatives, such as tax breaks for companies that hire Veterans. The White House Joining Forces initiative, led by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, has challenged and mobilized the private sector to increase Veteran hiring. But we still have a long way to go, and these promising signs are no reason to let up on the message that Veterans are good for business, or that the issue is no longer a big deal. Veterans deserve a meaningful career after service, and it’s incumbent on anyone who can help to make that a reality.