Our next topic is PTSD in veterans: Military Culture. Why is it important to be culturally competent?
Increasing numbers of health care professionals with no prior military service history or experience working with military Service Members, Veterans, or their families are being called upon to deliver patient care to these rapidly growing populations. For current and former military Service members, the explicit organizational structures and implicit ideals and values comprising military culture play a significant and lifelong role in injury, illness, and recovery.
In all fields of health care, but most especially in mental health evaluation and treatment, empathic therapeutic alliances and effective treatment plans require health care professionals to possess and utilize detailed knowledge, skills, and attitudes regarding military and Veteran cultures and subcultures.
Psychological health providers have an unfamiliar new clientele:
- Service members, and their families, who are coming home after a decade of war. Although members of the U.S. Armed Forces look like their civilian peers, their life experience is very different.
- Its important to understand, communicate, and effectively interact with service members and their families.
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