The Veterans' Administration should expect a high volume of Iraq
veterans seeking treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, with
researchers anticipating that the rate among armed forces will be
as high as 35%, according to the Management Insights feature in the
current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of
the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
(INFORMS®).
Management Insights, a regular feature of the journal, is a
digest of important research in business, management, operations
research, and management science. It appears in every issue of the
monthly journal.
"A Dynamic Model for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among U.S.
Troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom" is by Michael P. Atkinson of the
Naval Postgraduate School and Adam Guetz and Lawrence M. Wein of
Stanford University.
The tempo of deployment cycles in the Iraq War is higher than
for any war since World War II, the authors write, and military
survey data suggest that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is
common among service members.
To assure ample mental health resources to care for returning
troops, the authors argue that it is important for the Department
of Veterans Affairs (VA) to forecast the timing and number of new
PTSD cases over the coming years, which is complicated by the fact
that many cases have delayed onset.
The authors combine a dynamic mathematical operations research
model with deployment data and PTSD data from the Iraq War, and
estimate that the PTSD rate among Iraq War veterans will be
approximately 35%, which is roughly double the rate from the raw
survey data. This doubling is due to the time lag between the
PTSD-generating event and the onset of symptoms and to the fact
that many surveyed troops will do subsequent deployments.
Consequently, the authors write, the VA system, which is already
experiencing significant delays for PTSD treatment provision,
urgently needs to ramp up its mental health resource capacity.
The current issue of Management Insights is available at http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/reprint/55/9/iv.
The full papers associated with the Insights are available to
Management Science subscribers. Individual papers can be
purchased at http://institutions.informs.org.
Additional issues of Management Insights can be accessed at
http://www.informs.org/site/ManSci/index.php?c=11&kat=Management+Insights.
The other Insights in the current issue are:
- Cause Marketing:Spillover Effects of Cause-Related Products in
a Product Portfolio by Aradhna Krishna, Uday Rajan
- Impact of Workload on Service Time and Patient Safety:An
Econometric Analysis of Hospital Operations by Diwas S. Kc,
Christian Terwiesch
- Service Interruptions in Large-Scale Service Systems by Guodong
Pang, Ward Whitt
- Quality Disclosure Formats in a Distribution Channel by Liang
Guo
- Labor Market Institutions and Global Strategic Adaptation:
Evidence from Lincoln Electric by Jordan I. Siegel, Barbara Zepp
Larson
- Poker Player Behavior After Big Wins and Big Losses by Gary
Smith, Michael Levere, Robert Kurtzman
- Revenue Driven Resource Allocation: Funding Authority,
Incentives, and New Product Development Portfolio Management by
Raul O. Chao, Stylianos Kavadias, Cheryl Gaimon
- A General Interindustry Relatedness Index by David J. Bryce,
Sidney G. Winter
- Competing Retailers and Inventory: An Empirical Investigation
of General Motors' Dealerships in Isolated U.S. Markets by Marcelo
Olivares, Gérard P. Cachon
SOURCE
