Veteran community engagement is an evolving discipline informed by traditional community-based participatory research, veteran studies, and veterans themselves. This Special Issue suggests that research collaborations including military veterans, soldiers, and their families as co-researchers is a critical next step toward a designing thinking perspective in social and healthcare systems for this population. This Special Issue was conceptualized through a veteran community-academic partnership formed over a decade ago. We briefly describe the activities of this partnership from 2008 to present in order to frame the praxis considerations within this issue. The partnership hosted several Warrior Summit conferences from 2013 to present, with the last of this series calling for academic contributions. The resulting papers drawn from the conference and other authors form this issue, and include a wide range of topics: Arts- and theater-based interventions for PTSD; engaging veteran college students in higher education; combining strengths of the chaplaincy and psychology to address changes in veteran identity after moral injury; multi-sector community coalitions for veteran reintegration in the US and Canada; veteran volunteering as a reintegration strategy; examining experiences of US military nurses; veteran collaboratively designed mindfulness groups in a VA healthcare system; engaging veterans on Community Advisory Boards; using photovoice to highlight veterans issues; collaborative research on veteran homelessness; veteran self-medication with psychedelics; community engaged addictions research; and collaboratively designing veteran peer support curricula. These projects represent an emerging movement and offer a multidisciplinary roadmap toward assisting and honoring veterans in their transition back into the civilian world.

Objectives: We sought to understand how pharmacists viewed and used a newly implemented prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP). We also sought to understand pharmacist orientation toward dispensing of controlled substances and the people who obtain them. Methods: We conducted three mini focus groups. The focus group findings were used to inform the design of a structured survey. We emailed a survey to 160 pharmacists who were employed in one statewide community chain store; we obtained 48 survey responses. Results: Focus groups findings suggested that, in relation to the dispensing of scheduled prescription medication, pharmacists were either “healthcare” oriented, “law-enforcement” oriented, or an orientation that combined these two perspectives. Surveys suggested that pharmacists found PDMPs easy to use and that they used them frequently – often to contact physicians directly. Surveys suggested that pharmacists were typically either “healthcare” oriented or “mixed” (combined perspectives). Pharmacist orientation was associated with the frequency with which they counseled patients about medication risk and the frequency with which they used the PDMP as the basis for contacting prescribers. Conclusions: Ongoing tracking of pharmacists' use of PDMPs is important both at the implementation stage and as PDMPs develop over time. The orientation construct developed here is useful in understanding pharmacist behavior and attitudes towards patients potentially at risk for misuse of controlled substance medications. Further research on this construct could shed light on barriers and incentives for pharmacist PDMP participation and use and provide guidance for pharmacist training, ultimately enhancing patient care.

Background: Patient engagement in research agenda setting is increasingly being seen as a strategy to improve the responsiveness of healthcare to patient priorities. Implementation of low‐dose computed tomography (LDCT) screening for lung cancer is suboptimal, suggesting that research is needed.Objectives: This study aimed to describe an approach by which a Veteran patient group worked with other stakeholders to develop a research agenda for LDCT screening and to describe the research questions that they prioritized.Methods: We worked with Veterans organizations to identify 12 Veterans or family members at risk for or having experience with lung cancer to form a Patient Advisory Council (PAC). The PAC met repeatedly from June 2018 to December 2020, both independently and jointly, with stakeholders representing clinicians, health administrators and researchers to identify relevant research topics. The PAC prioritized these topics and then identified questions within these areas where research was needed using an iterative process. Finally, they ranked the importance of obtaining answers to these questions.Results: PAC members valued the co‐learning generated by interactions with stakeholders, but emphasized the importance of facilitation to avoid stakeholders dominating the discussion. The PAC prioritized three broad research areas—(1) the impact of insurance on uptake of LDCT; (2) how best to inform Veterans about LDCT; and (3) follow‐up and impact of screening results. Using these areas as guides, PAC members identified 20 specific questions, ranking as most important (1) innovative outreach methods, (2) the impact of screening on psychological health, and (3) the impact of outsourcing scans from VA to non‐VA providers on completion of recommended follow‐up of screening results. The latter two were not identified as high priority by the stakeholder group.Conclusions: We present an approach that facilitates co‐learning between Veteran patients and providers, researchers and health system administrators to increase patient confidence in their ability to contribute important information to a research agenda. The research questions prioritized by the Veterans who participated in this project illustrate that for this new screening technology, patients are concerned about the practical details of implementation (e.g., follow‐up) and the technology's impact on quality of life.Patient or Public Contribution: Veterans and Veteran advocates contributed to our research team throughout the entire research process, including conceiving and co‐authoring this manuscript.

For veterans with moral conflicts brought on by war work, evidence-based approaches designed for posttraumatic stress disorder tend not to attend to resulting spiritual and ethical forms of suffering. These “treatment-resistant” veterans are at high risk for self-harm. While new medical treatments are being developed, it is also clear that veterans themselves are experimenting in collective, ritualistic, and community-based ceremonial uses of psychedelic medicine. This article introduces the concept of altered states of combat (ASCombat) to refer to the specific mind-set soldiers experience in combat. As a preliminary analytical framework, we associate ASCombat to the widely studied altered states of consciousness as a way to advance understanding on the use and effectiveness of psychedelics and collective healing in the veteran population. The notion of ASCombat and typology is grounded in 4 years of veteran-engaged research in community-based healing approaches. The self-report of one case, by the veteran author of this article, provides suggestive materials for analysis, discussion, and future research.