We were talking about this the other day. One of the words we came up with was “concierge” service. What needs to happen is that the soldier needs to have a champion, someone who's assigned to them prior to release, not just at the point of release.
Once the injury happens, they'll go to a temporary medical category where they will be on reduced duties or doing different things. Before they get to a permanent category, if someone is engaged at that point in time, talking to the person about what the future looks like, what their potential opportunities are, it changes the game. It really does.
In my world, the beauty of it is that we do that before the member takes off the uniform, because there are avenues of recourse for the member and other resources they can draw on that won't be available once the uniform comes off. If we did some more work in-house to make sure the member was best prepared to leave, I believe it would go a long way. Having one point of contact to coach someone through that full process would be instrumental in what we're trying to achieve going forward.