Skip to main content

Military Health System

New NICoE director sets an ambitious agenda for the future

Image of Military personnel wearing face mask while talking to each other. Military personnel wearing face mask while talking to each other

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence | Education & Training Events | Brain Injury Awareness | Centers of Excellence | The National Intrepid Center of Excellence

To Navy Capt. (Dr.) Carlos Williams, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence is a gem of the Military Health System, where victims of traumatic brain injury come for care that is intensive, interdisciplinary, holistic and family-based.

Williams has been the director of NICoE at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, since October. Before that he was special advisor and director of the Office of Global Health Engagement for the Navy, and he is the immediate past regional health affairs attaché to the Pacific Islands.

He received his medical degree from Morehouse School of Medicine and completed his internship and residencies in internal medicine and pediatrics at Wayne State University in Detroit. Williams holds an appointment as assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and adjunct professor at Morehouse.

Just a few months into his new duty station, Williams already takes a great deal of pride in what NICoE has done, and where it's going.

"It really stands at a unique crossroads," Williams said. "In 2010 (when NICoE was founded), we were in the midst of the wars, and TBI was front and center. The challenge with it today is that TBI is still important because these injuries and these wounds, they don't go away just because the fighting stops. They are lifetime chronic diseases that you deal with."

Since that founding, 10 other centers across the country - the Intrepid Spirit Center Network, or ISCs - have been stood up to support the work of NICoE. Williams' vast experience with global health programs will come in handy as he assesses what comes next for NICoE and the ISCs.

Williams also earned his MBA from Johns Hopkins University, so the business of medicine is not foreign to him, particularly with the Defense Health Agency and the Military Health System. He knows how health care works, having spent two years on Capitol Hill working for the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Foundation. He was selected as an inaugural U.S. Presidential Leadership Scholar in 2015. He's done interagency, international, and public-private partnership work. The Georgia native has been around.

"The first thing we did was a stakeholder analysis, just to look at all our strengths and weaknesses," Williams said. "We want to focus on really maturing and establishing a firm network across the board. That means the NICoE and ISC network, we want that to be a true entity with a value proposition ... with academia, with industry, with interagency, and with other DOD partners. But our primary role is to support our active duty members."

He plans to do that by increasing NICoE's research capabilities and launching a program called TRIP (Translating Research Into Practice) with "clinically relevant activities." The goal is to take NICoE's decade of research and translate it into better care, he said, including standardization and expansion of outpatient services as well as intensive care offerings.

"We want to make sure that we show the value that these centers provide and how they're productive and what it takes to run them," Williams said. "This is an interdisciplinary model. We are discussing these patients individually, and one aspect affects another. It's a unique model for caring for patients. We want to improve patient outcomes and show how this model does that."

Other bullet list items are education, training, and outreach, including more interaction with the media and educating the public through tools like webinars. "One of my big initiatives for this year is really getting beyond the walls of Walter Reed," he said. "I'm excited. It's going to be a big year."

Military personnel standing with former presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton
Navy Capt. (Dr.) Carlos Williams (center) with former U.S. presidents George W. Bush (left) and Bill Clinton at the graduation of the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program in 2015 (Courtesy Capt. Carlos Williams).

'Your best life'

Caring for a TBI patient is not just a one-disease process, he said. The neurological and rehabilitative aspects, for instance, go hand-in-hand with the engagement of patients' family members. And because TBI is often a life-long struggle, learning to live with one's injuries is paramount.

"Learning resiliency from them, and learning how to make this work for you, so you can achieve your best life, that's what it really boils down to," said Williams, adding that the family therapy program has really taken off in the last few years.

With TBI injuries, so many aspects of one's life are affected profoundly. Sleep, balance, cognition, hearing, and speech, to name a few. That means that everything you know as normal has changed, Williams said. It's enough to make the patient feel that they are an entirely different person. And families must adjust to the new norm as well, especially since many manifestations of TBI are behavioral in nature.

NICoE admits about six new patients a week, or 24 per month, who do intensive four-week programs, Williams explained.

Williams said he often hears that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all but over. But that's not true, especially for someone who has yet to be diagnosed for post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, or a head injury that has yet to be treated.

"No one wants to be taken out of the fight. No one wants to be sidelined because of injury," he said. "So they cope with it, they try to deal with it, until they can't deal with it anymore. What makes NICoE and the Intrepid Spirit Centers so unique is that we take care of you where you are."

Some service members had their first concussion 10 years ago, he explained, but they dust themselves off and keep going.

For 2021, Williams explained how the COVID-19 pandemic opened the door to tele-health, which will enable a wider group of services. "It has really and truly improved access to care."

But the big picture for this year is the network, he said. "Showing the MHS our value as a network, and not just individual entities. ... My primary objective is to make sure that people see the value of this organization and the value of caring for patients with TBI, and then codifying this network of Spirit Centers. I want it to be known."

Williams' plans for 2021 are ambitious, but he realizes that TBI is a tricky field.

"It's not like a surgery," he said. "You have to rely on the patient (to communicate). It's about 'How do I feel?' I can't go in and surgically repair a TBI. Not in this case. These are psychological wounds of war. Some of them have physical implications to them, too, and we fix those and work with those. But the challenge is, how to you access these outcomes?

"We want to see patient outcomes. They went back to a job. They got a promotion. They stayed in the military longer. Those are the stories that make us know that what we do matters."

You also may be interested in...

TBI Caregiver Support Forms

Form/Template
6/29/2021

This is a fillable and printer-friendly version of the forms available in the "Traumatic Brain Injury: A Guide for Caregivers of Service Members and Veterans."

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence | TBI Patient and Family Resources

Aphasia, Caused by Stroke or TBI, is Frustrating and Little Known

Article
6/29/2021
A doctor looking at brain scans

Aphasia is an incurable disease usually caused by stroke that affects all forms of communication.

Recommended Content:

Total Force Fitness | Heart Health | Centers of Excellence | Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence

NICoE Education Webinar Series: July Poster

Publication
6/25/2021

Service Members and TBI: The Not So Invisible Wound

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence | Education & Training Events | Centers of Excellence

Vision Care Service Coordinators Support Ocular Care Management

Article
6/24/2021
Military health personnel giving an eye appointment

Vision care service coordinators support eye injury and vision loss patient recovery.

Recommended Content:

Centers of Excellence | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention

Retinopathy of Prematurity, Important Focus for Military Eye Doctors

Article
6/23/2021
Health personnel conducting a morning assessment on an infant

Retinopathy of Prematurity is a little-known disease with big risks.

Recommended Content:

Children's Health | MHS GENESIS: The Electronic Health Record | Centers of Excellence

NICoE Education Webinar Series: June Poster

Publication
6/23/2021

Combat-related Concussion: Understanding Trajectories of Long-term Clinical and Imaging Outcomes

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence | Education & Training Events

TBICoE Virtual Quarterly Education Series: July 2021

Publication
6/22/2021

The Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence is hosting a caregiver education series to learn about TBI caregiver resources, mind-body wellness exercises, and current research in the field.

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence | TBI Educators | Education & Training Events

Progressive Return to Activity Following Concussion/mTBI Patient and Leadership Guide

Publication
6/22/2021

The Progressive Return to Activity Following Concussion/mTBI Patient and Leadership Guide alerts command and line leaders about the PRA process and provides service members with appropriate activities for each stage of their recovery.

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence | TBI Patient and Family Resources

Patients Contribute to Shape Future Hearing Loss Treatment

Article
6/21/2021
Barbara Kelly from the Hearing Loss Association of America hosting a meeting

Patient-focused meeting could lead to improved hearing loss therapies

Recommended Content:

Centers of Excellence | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention | Hearing and Balance Injuries | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention

Cataracts Concern Battle Fighters, the Aging

Article
6/21/2021
A doctor performing cataract surgery

Traumatic cataracts can occur during battlefield injuries, but they are largely avoidable in non-combat situations.

Recommended Content:

Centers of Excellence | | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention

Start the Conversation

Video
6/18/2021
Start the Conversation

It’s not always obvious when someone is experiencing depression or thinking about suicide. In this video, learn how you can identify signs of distress and take action by starting the conversation about getting help.

Recommended Content:

Centers of Excellence | Psychological Fitness | Suicide Prevention

How vision and hearing contribute to service members’ readiness

Article
5/26/2021
Military personnel preparing for night vision training

Hearing and sight are the two dominant human senses, both primordial for military service members’ readiness, health, and mission success.

Recommended Content:

Centers of Excellence | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention | Vision and Hearing Loss Prevention

Stress relief is an important element to mental health

Article
5/24/2021
Military personnel playing with a therapy dog

For Mental Health Awareness Month, we learn how service members relieves their stress.

Recommended Content:

Mental Health: Seeking Care with TRICARE | Centers of Excellence

TBI Topic Page Review Form

Publication
5/21/2021

The Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence (TBICoE) manages the content on the Health.mil Traumatic Brain Injury Topic Page for the Defense Health Agency (DHA). To submit content for review and approval to this page, Military Health System agencies and other government partners can email this form, along with attached content in a Word document, to the TBICoE website manager at dha.TBICoEinfo@mail.mil.

Recommended Content:

Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence

Reducing the stigma and encouraging mental health care in the military

Article
5/18/2021
Military personnel wearing face masks talking

A mental health expert talks about the importance of reducing stigma by changing our vernacular to change the culture.

Recommended Content:

Mental Health: Seeking Care with TRICARE | Centers of Excellence
<< < ... 6 7 8 9 10  ... > >> 
Showing results 76 - 90 Page 6 of 18
Refine your search
Last Updated: December 28, 2022
Follow us on Instagram Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Follow us on YouTube Sign up on GovDelivery