Qualitative Study of the United States Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment

Serious health care issues were discovered first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007 and later at U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs health care organizations in 2014 (Brady, 2012; Cohen, Griffin, & Bronstein, 2014; Wright, 2013). The continued success of the Wounded Warrior Program requires a system that will constantly assess and analyze health care quality from the patient’s experience. From a systems perspective, health care quality encompasses six dimensions, and the study involved examining the dimension and four core concepts of patient-centered care (Institute of Medicine, 2001; Lees, 2011; Wexler, 2002; World Health Organization, 2006). A qualitative, phenomenological research method was selected for this study. Purposeful sampling was used to identify 10 marine veterans from the targeted population of wounded warriors previously assigned to the Naval Medical Center San Diego Wounded Warrior Detachment. The researcher as the instrument used an interview protocol with standardized, open-ended questions aligned with the research question. The findings of the study were reported according to the research question, and the following themes were identified: professional hospital staff, structured military culture, organized communication processes, shared decision making, and systematic teamwork