THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 11, 1997 TAG: 9702110225
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 63 lines
Each year, the Navy spends about $4.5 billion on health care - nearly as much as it spends running the Atlantic fleet. But only 1 percent of its medical budget is spent on programs to prevent illness.
Given military budget cuts, however, the priority in military medicine must shift to one more focused on prevention, 2nd Fleet commander Vice Adm. Vernon E. Clark told a standing-room-only crowd Monday morning.
``We need to promote ideas that will make us viable for the future,'' said Clark, the keynote speaker for the 38th Navy Occupational Health and Preventive Medicine Workshop. ``The global change going on in the world will have an effect on us and we will not be insulated from it.''
Clark spoke to more than 2,000 military and civilian health professionals gathered for the conference, which runs through Friday at the Cavalier Beach Club.
The end of the Cold War era, with its concurrent cuts in military funding, means doing more with less. On the military medicine side of defense, Clark said, that means focusing on cost-effective preventive efforts - like smoking cessation, alcohol awareness and improved lifestyle changes - instead of the treatment-focused approach military medicine has traditionally taken.
Air Force surgeon general Lt. Gen. Charles H. Roadman II expanded Clark's theme, warning the audience that converting from a curative to a preventive system would be ``gut-wrenching.''
If he were to hand out a bumper sticker espousing the new paradigm, he said, it would read: ``Prevent when you can; cure when you must.''
That means taking a deliberate, systems-based approach to health care, defining the problem with data, starting programs to improve community health, then evaluating the results with still more data.
For instance, Roadman said, one of the most common drugs prescribed in the military is for hypertension. Instead of treating the problem by pushing pills, he said, doctors should be preventing the problem by changing lifestyles.
And the changes need to be focused, not a scattershot approach to wellness that the military typically takes.
It means identifying women who are overdue for mammograms, then calling them and scheduling the tests instead of advertising community-wide screening programs.
It means targeting those who want to quit smoking, who want to stop drinking, instead of pushing smoking cessation and alcohol information programs to every smoker and drinker in the military.
It all comes down to building better systems, he said. To creating a medical system that operates as a cohesive unit, instead of as a collection of ``cottage industries,'' individual treatment facilities working independently of one another.
``It is not just, `do you have a hard belly? Are you getting good nutrition? Are you running?' '' Roadman said.
``It is all of them. It is the gestalt of a healthy environment in which to live and work.'' ILLUSTRATION: ``PREVENT WHEN YOU CAN; CURE WHEN YOU MUST''
[Color Photo]
CHARLIE MEADS
The Virginian-Pilot
The keynote speaker, Vice Adm. Vernon E. Clark, said cuts in
military funding will mean that military medicine needs to move away
from the treatment-focused approach it has traditionally taken.