New screening for sailors heading overseas

[unhappycamper]

Sailors recently assigned to the aircraft carrier George Washington look on as the ship returns to Yokosuka, Japan, in September after a three-month deployment. Sailors heading overseas will soon face a new screening process


New screening for sailors heading overseas
By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Dec 11, 2009 17:50:36 EST

SAN DIEGO — Navy personnel officials have approved changes to the overseas screening policy, hoping to make sure that sailors assigned to forward areas aren’t bounced back to the U.S.

Commands “see sailors reporting to us who come with many issues that could have been resolved or found out during the overseas screening process,” said Fleet Master Chief (SW/AW) Marcos Sibal, the top enlisted adviser with 7th Fleet in Japan. “We, the top leadership, just need to put more rigor in the process.”

The latest revisions will clarify screening procedures, such as the approval for waivers; some forms, including the checklist, will be simplified but more detailed in some places — all measures “to try to make it more user-friendly,” said Cmdr. Carl Chaffin, management and procedures branch head at Navy Personnel Command. “We received input from some commands that some of the questions were a little bit ambiguous.”

The changes are meant to tackle the problem of sailors who are sent overseas who should have been kept stateside because of personal problems, family troubles or medical issues. More than 16,000 sailors received orders to overseas duty in fiscal 2009; less than 1 percent are reported as a screening deficiency, Chaffin said.

Those cases “are where the system failed,” he said. “They should have been caught and they got overseas-screened before somebody caught up with it.”


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/12/navy_screening_121109w/

[fasttense]

1. It was my experience that overseas screening in the Navy

was always a low priority for a command. It was frequently considered just another bureaucratic hurdle to be rushed through by overworked personnel.