Vision Center of Excellence to Move to New Walter Reed

By Elizabeth Lockwood Health.mil

In 2011, the Defense Vision Center of Excellence (VCE) is scheduled to move into 4,000 square feet of space in the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to include office space and an outreach and information center that will be open and available to everyone.

Co-located with other optometry and ophthalmology offices, the VCE will be a part of a veritable eye center at the new Walter Reed. The VCE, which currently operates from offices near the Pentagon in Rosslyn, Va., was established in 2008 to improve care for service members with visual disorders or visual disturbances, including traumatic brain injury.

VCE Director Col. (Dr.) Donald Gagliano delivered the news about the VCE’s scheduled move to representatives from 11 veterans service organizations (VSOs) at a Nov. 19 meeting in Washington hosted by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

The meeting was an opportunity for the VCE and VSOs to discuss mutual objectives and identify collaborative opportunities.

“The VCE is here to serve the community,” Gagliano said. “You help us by telling us where there are initiatives we should be aware of, and you even help us get the word out about our own initiatives. You are an important piece of our work within the military medical community.”

Gagliano also spoke about the substantive work that the VCE hopes to accomplish in the next few years. Currently there are not many statistics surrounding blast injuries and vision loss, he said. But the VCE plans on establishing a routine process to gather information from joint DoD/VA records and use it to learn more about the relationship between blasts, traumatic brain injury and vision interruption or loss. In turn, the data can be used to further develop preventive techniques and treatment options available to service members and veterans.

While the VCE conducts its own research and analysis based on the data gathered from DoD/VA records , it also maintains awareness of eye health research being conducted outside the DoD, including VA research efforts, and aims to collaborate with these organizations to further advancements the field.

“Our goal is to bring together researchers everywhere on specific issues, and to communicate with one another and enhance our own work and the work of others,” said Dr. Claude L. Cowan, deputy director of VCE and a senior VA staff member,

Gagliano said that the VCE is strategically located to influence the spending of congressionally managed funds while collaborating with organizations from the DoD and VA to the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.

“We see that as a part of our responsibility: to build collaboration,” Gagliano said.

The meeting included a conversation on the continuity of eye care for service members and veterans. Participants agreed that short-term goals should be established to mandate eye examinations as a step in triage and creating question sets for service members to complete in their home communities with local ophthalmologists.

“There should be a system in place to determine whether service members are receiving proper and appropriate eye care,” said Cowan. “Some eye injuries present later, but we don’t know why. We need to make sure that service members and veterans are not only receiving eye examinations, but that they are being checked for all the right things.”

VSOs represented at the meeting included the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Blinded Veterans Association, Vietnam Veterans of America, Veterans of Modern Warfare, the National Association of Uniformed Services, the Fleet Reserve Association, the Retired Enlisted Association, and the Air Force Sergeants Association