Getting into the VA Posted on October 25, 2007 Mark S. Bauer (bio) provides excellent advice for researchers who want to work in and get funded by the VA.

How do you do research in the VA and what are the possibilities and potentials there? Well there’s two ways to do it. One is to collaborate with people who are at the VA, and who are researchers there and have shops set up. And we have been very welcoming, I speak for a large group that I’m part of, of non-VA researchers coming in and taking an interest in these datasets, working them up, and getting papers out, getting presentations out. So that’s one way to do it.

The other way to do it is to develop a joint appointment and actually get clinical appointment at a VA, where the magic number is twenty-five hours a week. If you’re working there twenty-five hours a week, you can then become eligible for grant funding from this separate VA funding stream. And so a lot of people, especially if the VAs are tightly affiliated and connected with the medical center, spend twenty-five hours a week at the VA and then the remainder of their time at the university hospital or doing some other things. So you can kind of work a combination career.

There are also VA research offices, so if you don’t know anybody at the VA, you would go to the associate chief of staff of research and say, “I am interested in” whatever it might be, “alcohol dependence and bipolar disorder. Is there any research going on in the VA?” And they are, that office is designed to facilitate research and every VA has one, and so that’d be really the place to start.
It’s really easy to find VA research information on the web. There’s a www.va.gov I think is the place to start.

There are a couple of key sub areas. Health Services Research and Development, HSR&D, has a web site, Clinical Science Research and Development has a web site. The VA is very well developed technologically, and actually has a large investment in information technology, so you can get around the web. And if you’re actually at VA medical centers, there’s lots of online learning capabilities and capacities at the VA.

For instance, if you have heard the word quasi-experimental design, and you wanted to know well what’s that all about, you can tune into webcasts by internationally known VA researchers who are doing quasi-experimental design and take a course from them. Several of us have done things like this to kind of increase our skill set.

It’s not as hard as it seems to get in to the VAs. The VAs function like any other sort of healthcare system, and if you come in and you take compassionate, evidence based effective care of patients, you’ll get the respect of staff members and patients. And this is nothing specific to the VA. We really faced the same issue when we were setting up the community partners program for STEP BD, the systematic enhancement program for bipolar disorder.

And one of the fascinating things that Jane Kogan and I and a number of us involved in the program learned is that you are going to get much better uptake of research into these sites if you are actually working at the site. So if you kind of floated in for a half day a week or a couple of hours and said, “Do you have any patients for me?” the answer’s gonna be no.

But if you’re spending some time there working along with the staff, taking care of patients, the doors open quite quickly. And so the rules are the same as they would be for any other kind of system, which is to be a part of the system, respect the system, work for it and the bounty comes back.

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