Article by Megan Hammari, Army Spouse
If you were to have asked me four years ago about the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) program, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much more than it was something you had to do before going overseas. We had lived overseas for almost four years and had passed the EFMP screening with no problems so I didn’t think anything about it. It wasn’t until my husband was selected to become a Foreign Area Officer for sub-saharan Africa that my crash course in EFMP truly began.
Being a Foreign Area Officer was a dream job for my husband. Not only would that allow him to use the language training he had received while on a church mission but it would mean that we, as a family, would get to live in places most people in the Army, heck, most people in the world don’t get to even visit. When he was selected for the program, our four daughters ranged from one to seven years old. My husband was serving as the company commander for the New Hampshire recruiting company and wouldn’t enter the FAO program for another year and a half. There are no military bases in New Hampshire and the closest base is an hour away in Massachusetts and is an Air Force base. So I wasn’t really aware of the EFMP program until we moved to Monterey to start the FAO training.
My second daughter was diagnosed with high functioning autism, PDD-NOS to be precise, a year earlier and I was still struggling to figure out how to deal with that. So once we arrived at a military facility and were told that this program was mandatory and that it would also help us receive services for our daughter, we filled out the forms. I was told that this program is designed so that the service member’s career isn’t put in jeopardy because of a family member’s special needs. What I didn’t know was that Foreign Area Officers fall into a special category along with any MOS where there a very few soldiers that can do the job and a limited amount of assignments where they can send them. In these special cases, if the receiving command can not support the special needs of the family member, then the service member is most likely going to be sent unaccompanied to that assignment.
This is what happened to us. Following his language training in Monterey, he was assigned to go to Senegal for his “In Region Training” (IRT). They couldn’t accommodate my daughter’s needs and so they sent him unaccompanied.
We were left to go where we wanted. We could have stayed in Monterey however we had a really bad experience with the school system there and it just wasn’t a viable option. Plus, we still owned our house in New Hampshire and only had temporary renters. So we ended up back in civilian land again. However, prior to moving, my eldest daughter was also diagnosed with high functioning autism and I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. During the year that my husband was gone, my third daughter was also diagnosed with high functioning autism.
One of the disadvantages of living away from a military base was the doctors didn’t know anything about the EFMP program, let alone how to fill out the paperwork correctly. So when I was told (incorrectly, I might add) that I had to update my EFMP paperwork prior to my husband’s return from Senegal, I had to explain to at least four different doctors how to fill out forms that I didn’t really know how to fill out myself. These doctors, without understanding the process, not only ended up putting a wish list of services on each of my daughters’ forms (for now my three oldest all qualified to be enrolled) but they also enrolled me for about six or seven different diagnoses, some of which I didn’t really have, as well as listing approximately seven or eight providers that I needed to see either weekly or monthly for those diagnoses.
What this meant was that we were not just denied accompanied overseas assignments, but CONUS assignments as well. I wasn’t aware of the mistakes, however, until my husband’s assignment cycle came up again and there were a couple of DC jobs, a job in Richmond, VA as well as some assignments in Europe along with the assignments to Africa on the list of possible assignments. When my husband received the assignment to go unaccompanied to Chad for 12 months, we were stunned. Upon inquiring why would we be separated again when there were definitely assignments that could have accommodated us as a family, we were told that they had considered us for the slot in Richmond but were denied due to lack of services in that area, specifically “that there wasn’t a developmental pediatrician within 100 miles of Richmond that took Tricare Prime.”
I have spent the last two years trying to fix the problems to the paperwork so that we might have a chance to be together as a family again. That was one of the main reasons I moved to Fort Belvoir while my husband was in Africa. Fort Belvoir is the home of the North Regional Medical Command, the same entity that I was dealing with when I submitted my EFMP packets by email. I was hoping that 1)being at a military medical facility would mean that the doctors would know how to fill out the paperwork and 2) I would be able to talk directly to the people that were inputting things into the system incorrectly. I was wrong on both accounts. The doctors ended up messing up the paperwork some more and NRMC is in a secure building and they don’t publish their phone number.
My family spent the last year in limbo because of the EFMP program. We are lucky that my daughters’ needs have dramatically decreased over the past several years but with the way EFMP works and with the frequency of our relocations, we have had a very difficult time getting the paperwork to reflect that. Some things are required to stay on the paperwork for 5 years before it call be removed. It was difficult trying to fix things when I had to restart with a new doctor every year or so and all they had to go by was the records I brought with me, my own words and what they see in the first one or two appointments. If they were civilian doctors, then they had the added issue of not knowing how to fill out the forms let alone fix problems from prior providers. Even when I had doctors in the military system, they weren’t insufficiently trained in how to fill out the EFMP paperwork for more complicated cases like mine. And once we got the paperwork filled out correctly, then the administrators at the EFMP clinic at Fort Belvoir or those that inputed the information into the system at NRMC made mistakes that they then refused to correct. They would defend their actions using all kinds of excuses, including citing the EFMP regulation to me and encouraging me to go home and read it for myself. At the end when I finally had escalated my case to the head staff of the hospital and was still having issues, the same EFMP administrator then accused me of withholding medical records and threatened me with an investigation so she could prove that they were right to keep the mistakes on my children’s file and that I was just trying to cover up evidence.
The EFMP program is very complex and profoundly affects those that end up enrolled. My husband’s current command ended up having to fight the EFMP system for six months in order to get us approved to come to Germany. Knowing what I know of from my previous time here in Germany coupled with my knowledge of my children’s needs, I am pretty confident that we will be just fine here. However, this isn’t how EFMP usually works. It doesn’t ask for our input at all during this process. It is up to the doctors, the administrators (who, in my experience, aren’t medical staff), and the gaining commands, who only go by what is put in the system by the other two. What I have learned by painful trial and many errors is that this is rarely sufficient to properly assess the true nature of our families’ needs and make decisions for us which so deeply impact our lives.
Now if people ask me about EFMP, I could probably tell them more than they ever wanted to hear. But because of EFMP, my girls and I might never get to go to Africa with our FAO. At least we are together this time and I am very grateful for that.
