VA SCOPES OUT MEDICAL NEEDS OF FEMALE VETERANS
From USA TODAY
Alyce Knaflich says she has been mistaken for someone’s wife when she walks in the front door of the Charles George VA Medical Center.
Instead of visiting a sick husband, the 53-year-old is at the Veterans Affairs hospital for her own health, including a form of post-traumatic stress disorder from nearly 20 years as a staff sergeant in the Army.
“There is an attitude that women didn’t serve their country,” says Knaflich, who proudly wears a jacket emblazoned with an American Veteran patch. “A lot of it is from the veterans themselves, but some is within the staff. They think veterans are men, not women.”
It’s an attitude the Department of Veterans Affairs wants to change.
The number of female veterans in the USA has doubled since the end of the Vietnam War and is projected to double again in the next five to 10 years, says Patricia Hayes, chief consultant for female veterans health at the VA.
Women today make up 15% of the active-duty military and 18% of reserve forces and National Guard. There are nearly 1.9 million female veterans in the USA.
The VA will spend $241 million this year on gender-specific care such as cervical cancer screenings and gynecology for the VA’s 300,000 female patients, Hayes says. The amount is up nearly $30 million from last year as more women seek care from the historically male-dominated VA, she says.
In Asheville, the hospital added a full-time gynecologist in 2008 and plans to add a full-time primary care doctor and double its space for female veterans, says Emine Cay Masters, medical director for its women’s health clinic and an Air Force veteran.
Elsewhere:
•In Martinsburg, W.Va., the VA opened a dedicated clinic last year for its 1,500 female veterans to handle everything from primary care to chronic conditions.
“The benefit of moving to a separate space is a lot of women feel there are barriers to accessing care in a population where they feel they are a minority,” says Amy Theriault, the hospital’s women veterans program manager.
The VA is also tracking the health of its female veterans with scorecards that capture data on concerns such as high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. It put the measure in place after finding that female veterans scored lower on routine health measurements than their male counterparts.
•In Pittsburgh, the VA in January finished building a separate waiting room and clinic for women with a play area for children, says Deborah Mitchum, the women veterans program manager. The facility got a grant for a wellness resource center that offers computers for research and literature on women-specific health issues in a cozy space complete with fireplace. Another grant is paying for the development of an incontinence prevention program. The facility also performs mammograms on-site.
•In Palo Alto, Calif., the VA won an award for excellence in women’s health care in 2008. Its 6,000 female veterans can get any medical service they need in-house with the exceptions of maternity care and mammograms, says Samina Iqbal, medical director of the women’s health program. In some areas cervical cancer screenings, for example the VA outpaces other hospitals in the community, she says.
Even mammograms might one day be the norm as more and more women seek VA services, Iqbal says.
“We are promoting a cultural change, which of course takes time,” she says. “But we are moving toward it.”
Advocates say the VA is on the right track, though getting top-notch care often depends on where you live.
Larger medical centers often have better-trained staffers and more services, says Genevieve Chase, founder of American Women Veterans.
One of the biggest problems, she says, is changing the way the Department of Veterans Affairs perceives women.
Chase says the VA has diagnosed some female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with depression instead of post-traumatic stress disorder because of the mind-set that they didn’t serve in combat. Women are not officially allowed in U.S. combat units.
Chase, a Purple Heart and Combat Action Badge recipient, who served in Afghanistan with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, tells a different story. The vehicle she was in was attacked in 2006 by a suicide car bomber.
“There is nothing worse than having gone through everything your buddies did when you were there and to come home and have people treat you as an afterthought or arm candy,” she says. “We are not going away. We are growing in number and we are growing in exposure to combat.”
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20110301/womenva01_st.art.htm
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David McKibben
