Chair, Vice-Chair, committee members and fellow speakers, thank you for this opportunity to participate in this important conversation regarding the experiences of women veterans.
We're happy that this committee has recognized the importance of including clinicians in the conversation regarding women veterans' experiences. My colleague and I have collectively spent 30 years working with veterans, CAF members and their families. As clinicians, we are often the knowledge brokers, trained to hold veterans' experiences without any agenda beyond healing, yet our collective voices are rarely heard.
We were invited here following a call of concern from a group of clinicians regarding the new Lifemark-PCVRS contract with Veterans Affairs for the rehab program. Our key apprehensions are, one, the program's lack of focus on cultural competency or trauma; two, the need for more transparency between VAC, PCVRS and the clinical service providers; and three, that the depreciation of the clinical expertise of current providers will have a negative implication for the veteran's treatment.
We will reserve the conversation regarding the lack of transparency in VAC programming and concerns about devaluing current service providers' expertise for future meetings. Today we will focus on the importance of cultural competency in women veterans' rehabilitation programming, and we will close by providing recommendations to the committee.
Since our initial communication with PCVRS, we have had multiple meetings with various stakeholders and have attempted to educate ourselves in all aspects of the program. The PCVRS program needs more detailed requirements for training backgrounds for those hired. We feel that clinicians hired for the new program must understand PTSD and complex PTSD, the sexual misconduct lawsuit and the institutional trauma experienced by many women veterans. We have provided definitions of these concerns in the end-notes of our statement.
Many women we work with release not because of deployment-related trauma but after experiencing sustained systemic trauma, feeling silenced or forced to soldier on despite moral and physical injuries, or they voluntarily release because they feel the slow release process increases their risk for suicidal ideation or attempts, thus creating trauma for their families, or they sense that they could no longer survive the process.
We want to quote a veteran who shared her experiences with us.