America's Warrior Partnership (AWP) announced a new partnership with Duke University as part of their ongoing project Operation Deep Dive™, a study encompassing five years of death data from states across the country, corroborated by the Department of Defense, looking into the deaths of former service members.

Duke University will act as the academic research partner for the project. Their research, in partnership with AWP, will seek to achieve two goals: First, researchers will seek to identify factors related to suicide and other causes of early mortality among U.S. military service members. Second, they hope to understand the influence of the social environment on death by suicide or other self-injury mortality among former U.S. military service members.

"Duke University is a renowned institution known for their quality research and academics," said Jim Lorraine, President and CEO of AWP. "We are excited to partner with an establishment marked by excellence to better understand former service member suicide and find preventive solutions. Our service members deserve nothing but the best."

In September, AWP released an interim report from Operation Deep Dive™. The research found that the rate of suicide and self-injury mortality is more than twice what the Department of Veterans Affairs had previously reported. As AWP looks to broaden the scope of their research, more state participation is necessary to expand the study and more effectively develop prevention methods.

"Investigation of premature mortality among former service members is a challenging undertaking, but, we believe, like America's Warriors Partnership, that this is a very important public health problem." –Truls Ostbye, MD, PhD, Vice Chair (Research) in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Duke University.

Researchers in Family Medicine and Community Health at Duke University hold expertise in occupational and community health, epidemiology, qualitative data collection and analysis, and analysis of big data and large health surveys—including the use of qualitative and quantitative data to inform intervention development focused on health behavior change. An integral part of family medicine and community health is prevention, which is the ultimate goal of the project.