Thank you for that easy question.
I think part of it still always comes back to prevention. If we put as much time and energy into preventing the problems, we'd have fewer problems, and the problems we did have would be less severe.
When you understand military culture, by going into the civilian system, which often can take years, that is years of stress on that person, which almost always impacts their performance in the workplace. It impacts their relationships in the workplace. As soon as you start having chronic stress problems, you usually start manifesting them in some way, mentally or physically. As soon as you get a medical problem, that can end your career.
As a physician, this is part of what I've seen over 35 years. Even when somebody rightly goes forward and does exactly everything that was asked of them, they can lose their health, and they lose their career as a result.
The system as it stands is not working. This is why I think it's so important that we started capturing data. It isn't just how long people have waited and what the outcome is. It is, how did that impact their life? How did that impact their career?
A very important person started up “It's Just 700” many years ago, and I remember always asking what the goal was and what the perfect situation was, because we're always going to have problems. Her comment—and I don't have a better answer—was that when something bad happens and you know it was wrong, you can name what it was, you know what your options are, and you can choose what you want to do and how to do it—maybe you want to wait until you're off deployment and around family to come forward. Whether you report or don't report, your career and your promotion continue either way. When we have those kinds of stats, then we have a system that's working.