Veterans get faster access to residential treatment

VA is advancing efforts to give Veterans faster and simpler access to its mental health residential rehabilitation treatment programs (RRTPs), which provide around-the-clock support for substance use disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and other mental health conditions. More than 27,000 Veterans were treated at RRTPs in fiscal year 2024, and VA has the bed capacity to serve even more.

VA’s national RRTP conference in September underscored the high priority VA is giving to fostering timely access for Veterans who need the programs. VA is accomplishing this largely by implementing a new centralized screening process for each region in VA.  

“Our patients deserve the soonest, best care when they need it,” Dr. Tamara Campbell, executive director of VA’s Office of Mental Health, told more than 350 VA RRTP and mental health professionals at the conference in Dallas. “Oftentimes we have capacity within VA to place Veterans in an RRTP, but we’re all doing the screenings maybe a different way or we don’t know where the capacity is. That is the need for centralized screening. We cannot continue to do business the way we’ve been doing business.”

Increasing Veterans’ options with streamlined screening

Residential rehabilitation treatment, sometimes referred to as inpatient residential or domiciliary care, is lifesaving for many Veterans. A recently published study showed that Veterans who received residential treatment for substance use disorder had a 66% lower mortality rate in the 12 months following their screening for admission than Veterans who did not.

VA offers more than 250 residential treatment programs at 123 sites of care in 44 states and U.S. territories, including programs in Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico. Veterans must apply or be referred for admission. Currently, applications are submitted to individual RRTP sites, which may not have available beds. When there is no space, applicants are referred to alternative RRTP sites within or outside of the VA system, requiring additional steps for Veterans, their families and referring providers.

VA has made progress in reducing wait times and placing Veterans by improving coordination between RRTP sites to find beds. The average wait time from screening to admission has dropped to 16 days, five days shorter than a year ago. Occupancy for the program’s more than 6,500 beds continues to increase as beds come back online following the pandemic.

Veterans will contact a single screening team

But more progress is needed. Centralized screening for each region is the next step, to be implemented across VA as soon as summer 2025. The process will be simpler for Veterans and referring providers to make it easier to find available beds.

Under the centralized process, a Veteran or their referring provider will contact a single screening team for their region. The team will apply a standardized process for assessing eligibility then search for the closest and best match for the Veteran among all programs within the regional network. Multiple programs can be considered at one time without additional screenings or consultations.

In May, the new process went live in its first region, centralizing screening across eight VA health care systems in five midwestern states. Preliminary data shows that centralized screening is reducing wait times in the region. The process also has resulted in a roughly 5% increase in the rate of Veterans accepted for admission at the initial screening.

Several other regions have already started planning for centralized screening and the rest of them were required to do so in sessions at the conference.

Learn about the programs available within an RRTP or find the location nearest to you.