Military medicine
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Total Force Fitness (TFF) metrics inform leaders at every level as they develop and evaluate policies, practices, and programs that enable soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, guardians, and operators to achieve human performance optimization in all eight domains as defined by the TFF framework. The Standardization Workgroup was a facilitated discussion breakout session among a group of uniquely informed and engaged attendees who were invited to be part of the TFF summit that was hosted in Bethesda, Maryland, on September 14 and 15, 2021. The Standardization Workgroup explored the 2018 TFF shift in perspective to consider human performance optimization in the context of a military unit's fitness for missions and identified several challenges, opportunities, and action items for improving the implementation and sustainment of TFF throughout the services. Key opportunities and recommendations synthesized from the workgroup discussion include the following: Creating true ownership of TFF by an entity with authority and engagement across the services; creating divisions of labor and assigning champion organizations with distinct areas of responsibility related to metric development, data accessibility, line-leader decision support, and data-driven policy and program review; leveraging and expanding the use of data repositories, secure data clouds, and artificial intelligence platforms to support a robust and integrated learning health and performance system; and prioritizing the operational line-leader stakeholder engagement at every stage of metric development and refinement as they are ultimately responsible for and have direct influence over the fitness of the individual service member and readiness to deploy of the military unit.
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Ensuring Force Health Protection (FHP) is one of the most critical priorities in the DoD; however, there is no systematic approach for individual service members to address their own FHP. This paper outlines the FHP Education workshop, a model program fielded at 3rd Special Forces Group, Fort Bragg, NC, which applies military processes, principles, and frameworks to teaching special operations forces operators and enablers how to address their own FHP by identifying and mitigating threats to health and performance in the military operational environment. The FHP Education workshop has the potential to be a well-received and impactful program that offers a proactive, whole of person, community-based preventive system aligned with the Total Force Fitness framework to enable individual service members to conduct FHP.
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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has launched an organization-wide transformation to a Whole Health System of Care that will ideally begin at the time of transition from active duty through the end of a Veteran's life. A brief history and overview of the Whole Health approach are provided along with selected evaluation results and planned initial actions as a result of the Total Force Fitness-Whole Health Summit held in March 2022. More work is required to strengthen the natural linkages between the Department of Defense's Total Force Fitness and Veterans Affairs' Whole Health approach to care. The Total Force Fitness-Whole Health collaboration is a model of whole-person care for the nation.