To inform improvements to the quality of care delivered by the military health system for posttraumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder, researchers developed a framework and identified, developed, and described a candidate set of measures for monitoring, assessing, and improving the quality of care. This document describes their research approach and the measure sets that they identified.

Private contractors have been deployed extensively around the globe for the past decade and may be exposed to many of the stressors that are known to have physical and mental health implications for military personnel. Results from a RAND survey offer preliminary findings about the mental and physical health of contractors, their deployment experiences, and their access to and use of health care resources.

As part of an evaluation of the Marine Corps Operational Stress Control and Readiness (OSCAR) program, this report describes the methods and findings of a large survey of marines who were preparing for a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan in 2010 or 2011. The results are among the first to shed light on the pre-deployment mental health status of marines, as well as the social resources they draw on when coping with stress and their attitudes about seeking help for stress-related problems.

The authors identified ten standards for the delivery of high-quality care for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, substance use disorders, and mild traumatic brain injury. They also provide considerations for implementing and disseminating these standards as a first step to improve access to high-quality care for veterans with invisible wounds.

A RAND study, the first to examine care received by a census of active-duty service members diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury in the Military Health System, assessed the number and characteristics of these patients (including deployment history and history of traumatic brain injury), their care settings, the treatments they received, co-occurring conditions, the duration of treatment, and the risk factors for requiring long-term care.