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Hospital Happenings

News | Jan. 9, 2024

BJACH hosts Exceptional Family Member and Army Medicine Key Leader Engagement

By Jean Graves, Medical Readiness Command, West

Bayne-Jones Army Community Hospital hosted hospital executives from across the state to an Army Medicine tactical combat casualty care and medical evacuation demonstration followed by a discussion of the Exceptional Family Member Program on Jan. 9, at the Joint Readiness Training Center and Fort Johnson.

Trisha Kearns, EFMP Program Coordinator with JRTC and Fort Johnson Army Community Service, defined the EFMP program as a comprehensive and coordinated approach to providing community support, housing, education, personal and medical services to Military Families.

“The program is for those who have a medical, mental, emotional, developmental, or educational needs requiring specialty care for six months or more,” she said. “EFMP ensures that Soldiers and Families are assigned to locations that can provide necessary medical and educational services.”

Nearly 95 attendees from medical facilities, municipalities, and local, state, and federal officials attended the BJACH-hosted event.

Lt. Col. Grigory Charny, deputy commander of clinical services, said the reason BJACH held the event was threefold; to foster relationships, help the community understand Fort Johnson’s critical combat medic mission, and share data about specialty services needed in the region.

“We provided information about the challenges faced by EFMP here in Central Louisiana,” he said. “We shared data with our partners that they may consider when making fiscal decisions on hiring actions of physicians, sub-specialties, and behavioral healthcare providers.”

Charny said building relationships with network hospital partners is important.

“I think engagements like this are priceless,” he said. “When there is a crisis, the BJACH leadership can reach out to our counterparts and on a first name basis solve a problem and take care of a patient more quickly.”

Charny said strong relationships with network hospital partners is vital to successful patient care.

“Medicine is not a practice in isolation,” he said. “All medicine is about professional and clinical relationships, white coat diplomacy, and the ability to take care of a patient holistically across many specialties and facilities. Because of this, we work very hard to develop and sustain these relationships.”

Charny said, “collaboration is also fulfilling and ensures the best outcomes for Soldiers and their Families.”

Traci Thibodeaux, CEO of Beauregard Regional Health System, said she appreciated the opportunity to attend.

“My biggest take-away was learning more about EFMP and the unique healthcare resource needs of our military families,” she said.

Thibodeaux said working together in healthcare is the key to success.

“It’s important to work together because rural healthcare providers don’t have the resources to be everything to everyone,” she said. “We can and should leverage each other’s strengths to help close gaps in care.”

Thibodeaux said she hoped the event inspires more collaboration amongst all organizations in attendance.

“I hope to gain improved collaboration, resource, and risk sharing to avoid over burdening any one provider while improving community-wide access to care,” she said.

Charny said his event illustrates to network partners that BJACH comes through.

“We stated that we intended to engage our partners and discuss EFMP during the Fall of 2023 after the community hospitals had graciously welcomed us to their facilities,” he said. “We accomplished this task within 100 days. Our partners noted they have not experienced an event like this in many years. It started off in a fun, punctual, and well-organized fashion. The weather was perfect and C Company, Cajun Dust off, 1st Battalion, 5th Aviation Regiment added to the whole program with a UH-60 Blackhawk demo and static display. We also illustrated to our civilian colleagues that Army Medicine is a unique organization of medical professionals who at any given moment can be called to support our nation, leaving Families behind to be cared for in the network.”
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