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The Gray Team, currently evolved into The Grey Team, and more formally known as The Joint Neurosciences Inspection Team, was the name given to a series of special inspection units commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to serve as mechanism to help improve the care of American forces serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their missions were particularly focused on the “invisible wounds of war” such as traumatic brain injury or post traumatic stress.
The original Gray Team was composed of hand-selected active duty members all of whom had prior deployment experience in a combat zone and relevant medical expertise. The original team had at least one representative from each of the four armed services branches. Col Macedonia appointed Col Michael Jaffee to be the clinical lead given his role as National Director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.
The original Gray Team traveled to a number of deployed bases and combat medical facilities from all branches of service across both Iraq and Afghanistan. They were focused on identifying barriers for implementation of screening and acute management of TBI and concussion. The team reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The largest impact was changing the military’s system from a symptom-based system in which a service member had to admit to having a symptom from a concussion or TBI to an incident-based system in which any service member involved in a blast or situation considered high risk for concussion would be screened and evaluated regardless of whether or not they self-reported any symptoms. This represented a paradigm shift and was the first time military combat policy was combined with medical guidelines. This paradigm shift has had lasting impact and is still in place today.
Subsequent Gray Team missions focused on having civilian researchers who worked with the military to have an opportunity to experience the environment and forward medical facilities and to further evaluate the implementation of changes established by the original Gray Team.