A Future Worth Creating

As leaders of the Military Health System (MHS), America has given us a humbling responsibility: The care of our country's fighting forces, their families and those who have served before us...more than 9 million people in all. Our health care team has performed exceptionally. During this conflict, military medicine has achieved unprecedented outcomes that are truly remarkable. We've achieved these results from the foundation of a vibrant military medical culture - one based on innovation, service to others, and an unrelenting persistence to achieve excellence.

While those within and outside of our system know well and acknowledge our clinical excellence and achievements, we have underperformed in important areas of service to our warriors. We received plentiful media coverage of some of these failures in 2007. But, our culture has within it an undeniable resilience and ability to learn from our mistakes and begin anew. We have been offered the opportunity to reinvent the disability rating process, the coordination of medical and personal services, and to look deeply inside our operations to rebuild our model for delivering exceptional service to those whom we care most, our military family.

Purpose, Vision, and Strategy

The senior medical leadership, the Surgeons General and our staffs have used this opportunity to re-examine our fundamental purpose, our vision of the future, and strategies to achieve that vision. We are refocusing our efforts on the core business in which we are engaged - creating an integrated medical team that provides optimal health services in support of our nation's military mission - anytime, anywhere. We are ready to go in harm's way to meet our nation's challenges at home or abroad - to be a national leader in health education, training, research and technology. We build bridges to peace through humanitarian support when and wherever needed, across our nation and the globe, and we provide premier care for our warriors and the military family.

Our ability to provide the continuum of health services across the range of military operations is contingent upon the ability to create and sustain a healthy, fit and protected force. Each of the MHS mission elements are interdependent and cannot exist alone. A responsive research, innovation and development capacity is essential to achieve improvements in operational care and evacuation. A medical education and training system that produces the quality clinicians demanded for an anytime, anywhere mission is critical, and we cannot produce the quality of medical professionals without a uniformed sustaining base and platform that can produce healthy individuals, families and communities.

We have a singular opportunity to build bridges to peace in hostile countries. In many circumstances, the MHS will serve as the tip of the spear and a formidable national strategy tool for the nation. And, we can take advantage of a one-time opportunity to design and build health facilities that promote a healing environment during the clinical encounter, empower our patients and families, relieve suffering, and promote long-term health and wellness. We will employ evidence-based design principles that link to improved clinical outcomes, patient and staff safety, and long-term operational efficiencies.

We must have a willingness to experiment, to create a learning support capacity, and to challenge our assumptions constantly in light of new challenges. We must take rational risks to move our system forward....risks that will place us in unchartered environments.

Our strategy is not about the future - it is, as Peter Drucker has said, about the future of decisions we make today.

Over the next decade, we will set the health quality standard in this nation. We will be recognized as a national leader in prevention and health promotion. Our military family population will be the healthiest cohort across the nation, and the MHS will be our country's workplace of choice.

You are inspirational. Every day you help the severely wounded rejoin the workforce and regain their purpose for living. You provide a range of support services to the military family, all with compassion and explicitly acknowledging the dignity of the Service Member and his or her family.

Secretary Gates calls our work sacred. Caring for America's heroes is not a motto. It is what we do. Our commitment to you is to provide you with the strategy, policy and resources to achieve excellence. We are indebted to your sacrifice and are honored to serve you.