THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 12, 1996 TAG: 9609120398
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 77 lines
When the military's surgeon generals meet each Wednesday morning, they usually find themselves agreeing on ways to bolster health care to service members and their families.
But the Navy's surgeon general, Vice Adm. Harold Koenig, says one notion is ``strictly the Navy's puppy.''
He wants to get rid of the service's clunky, standard-issue, plastic-framed eyeglasses - specs so ugly, so bereft of fashion sense that sailors have dubbed them ``BCGs,'' or ``birth-control glasses.''
In their place, he'd have the Navy offer ``frames of choice,'' including more stylish aviator and submariner wire frames.
Too often in the past, he said, sailors have spent their own money on glasses, ``and that's money they don't have.''
``If we're going to give these kids glasses, we need to give them ones they'll wear,'' he said.
The seagoing service's top doc has a few other ideas he wants to try right away, as he and the Navy make decisions that will affect its health care efforts for years to come.
Among them: taking steps to change the fleet's bad health habits before they become costly medical problems.
``We've spent the last decade and a half trying to bring Navy health care out of the post-Vietnam doldrums of the 1970s,'' said Koenig, who today wraps up a three-day tour of the area's naval medical network.
``We've come to an intersection. We can go straight ahead, to curative medicine, or we can turn a corner, to preventative medicine.''
Now a year into his four-year assignment as Navy surgeon general, Koenig spent part of his visit here dedicating a new wellness center at the Norfolk Naval Station.
Not clinics, not gyms, wellness centers are designed to ``keep sailors from running themselves into the ground,'' he said.
They provide service members with medical and physical fitness screening tests that let them know if they're living risky lifestyles - and advice on how to change.
That kind of thinking explains, too, why a nutritionist and a physical therapist are assigned to the aircraft carrier Enterprise, which today is steaming in the Adriatic Sea. The nutritionist is aboard the Norfolk-based ship to identify poor eating habits. The physical therapist is studying on-the-job movements that tend to lead to injury.
Koenig is big on ``taking health care to the deckplate'' - where sailors and Marines work. For example, new Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton now have their first military dental exams while learning how to aim and fire their rifles.
``They can sit in a dental chair in a tent instead of standing around waiting for their turn on the firing range,'' Koenig said.
What the California Marines are doing is part of ``business process re-engineering'' - ``fancy wording,'' Koenig said, ``for good ideas.''
``Good ideas never have to have my permission. I tell people, just do it, then let me know what you did.''
Along with such other innovations as telemedicine - a state-of-the-art communications system through which medical crews aboard ships at sea can consult military hospitals and doctors - Koenig wants to assign more medical and dental corpsmen to independent duty, and have them take on more responsibility in branch clinics.
Responding to a story in the Sept. 16 issue of Navy Times that said the outgoing surgeon general of the Army has issued ``a blistering assessment of TRICARE,'' Koenig said Lt. Gen. Alcide LaNoue's comments were blown out of proportion.
Marketing TRICARE - the military's health care program - is another one of Koenig's goals for his tenure as Navy surgeon general.
``TRICARE is the most important move in military health care in the past 30 years,'' he said. ``As a consequence of an all-volunteer force, the population we serve is growing and changing. Right now, more than half of TRICARE's customers are retirees and dependents.'' ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
The Virginian-Pilot
Vice Adm. Harold Koenig, the Navy's surgeon general by CNB