mHealth Counseling Can Help Veterans Cope With Stress While at Work

An mHealth program offering counseling to veterans in the workforce can help reduce symptoms of depression while improving workplace productivity, according to researchers at Boston’s Tufts Medical Center.

In a study recently published in JAMA Network Open, the US Veterans Health Administration’s Be Well at Work (BWAW) program, included in an integrated care program, helped working veterans by giving them access to phone-based counseling on coping skills.

“Facilitating reentry and reintegration into civilian life are high-priority goals within the Department of Veterans Affairs, and many employers want to hire veterans and be assured that they will function effectively in the workplace,” the study, led by Debra Lerner, MSc, PhD, of the Tufts University School of Medicine and Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, concluded. “Depression and difficulty functioning in occupational roles and settings pose significant barriers to achieving success. Building telephonic work-focused care into (integrated care) offers a holistic, accessible, and economical solution. As the VHA invests in telemedicine to address access barriers, BWAW’s telephone-based counseling provides a further opportunity to make higher-quality care more accessible to veterans.”

Lerner and her colleagues focused on roughly 250 veterans receiving care through a large VHA medical center and two smaller satellite sites between 2014 and 2019, dividing them into one group that received traditional integrated care and one that received integrated care as well as BWAW services.

The BWAW program consists of eight biweekly telephone sessions and one phone-based “booster visit” after four months, and includes treatment for stress through coping skills. Counselors conducting the treatment assess occupational functioning and depression symptom severity on a monthly basis, sharing their findings with the patient’s care providers through the VHA’s EHR platform. They also help the patient identify strategies for coping with depression and improving workplace productivity and assign “homework” in between the phone-based consults so that patients can test and modify their coping skills and work modification strategies throughout the program.

According to the results of the study, those veterans using BWAW saw “larger reductions in at-work productivity loss” as well as “significantly greater reductions in depression symptom severity.”

The study highlights the capabilities of connected health programs to deliver targeted care at a time and place convenient to both patient and provider, a factor particularly important to veterans looking to integrate back into the workforce. In addition, these services can be administered by phone or online, giving the veteran more freedom to access care at his or her convenience.