Continuing the Transformation: Charting the Path for the Future Delivery of Veteran Emergency Care

Abstract

Important changes in the delivery of Veteran emergency care in the early 2000s in the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) emergency departments and urgent care clinics substantially elevated the role of emergency medicine (EM) in Veteran health care. Focused on enhancing the quality of care, emergency care visits in both VA and non-VA (community) care locations have nearly doubled from the 1980s to more than 3 million visits in Fiscal Year 2022. Recognizing the need to plan for continued growth and the opportunity to address key research priorities, the VA Office of Emergency Medicine, together with the VA Health Services Research and Development Service, collaborated to convene a State of the Art Conference on Veteran Emergency Medicine (SAVE) in the winter of 2022. The goal of this conference was to identify research gaps and priorities for implementation of policies for three priority groups: geriatric Veterans, Veterans with mental health and substance use complaints, and Veterans presenting to non-VA (community) emergency care sites. In this article we discuss the rationale for the SAVE conference including a brief history of VA EM and the planning process and conclude with next steps for findings from the conference.