What is it about?

This article describes a new project designed to help military clinics use one of the best treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), called prolonged exposure therapy. Military health clinics are spread out and often face challenges when trying to put research-based therapies into everyday practice. The project, called TACTICS, worked with eight clinics to find out what was getting in the way of using this therapy and created custom plans to help each clinic improve. Clinics also got coaching support and a toolkit full of practical resources they could use to make changes.

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Why is it important?

Even though we know that some therapies work very well for PTSD, they aren’t used as often as they should be. TACTICS provided a new way to help clinics figure out what’s blocking them from offering these therapies and how to fix it. Plus, the tools created through this project are now free for anyone to use — not just military clinics. That means many other mental health clinics could also use these ideas to bring better care to more people.

Perspectives

I wanted to share this work because translating evidence-based therapies into everyday practice — especially in large, complex systems like the Military Health System — remains a major challenge. We developed TACTICS to offer clinic managers a structured, practical way to identify local barriers and act on them. Although the project focused on prolonged exposure for PTSD, the lessons we learned and the tools we created have much broader relevance for expanding evidence-based care across many mental health conditions.

Jeffrey Cook
Uniformed Services University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Developing and implementing a process improvement intervention to expand evidence-based psychotherapy in the Department of Defense., Psychological Services, April 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/ser0000942.
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