How Military Service Affects Veterans’ Health: What All Nurses Need to Know

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Photo (c) Associated Press Photo (c) Associated Press

“The war tried to kill us in the spring,” says John Bartle, the narrator of The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers’s acclaimed novel about two U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq. “I know now that everything that will ever matter in my life began then.” The same might be said by many war veterans. The effects of military service, especially on veterans’ health, vary greatly and can be lasting. And with most veterans seeking care through non-VA channels, it’s imperative that civilian nurses have some knowledge of the health issues veterans face.

In this month’s CE, “Enhancing Veteran-Centered Care: A Guide for Nurses in Non-VA Settings,” authors Barbara Johnson and colleagues describe a wide range of veterans’ health concerns and provide guidance for civilian nurses caring for these patients.

Overview: There are currently 22.5 million living U.S. military veterans, and this number is expected to increase dramatically as military personnel return from Iraq and Afghanistan. Although honorably discharged veterans may qualify for health care through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), only about 25% of all veterans take advantage of this benefit; a majority seek services in non-VA settings. It’s imperative for nurses in all civilian care […]

2016-11-21T13:07:05-05:00July 3rd, 2013|Nursing|1 Comment
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Fictional Nurses, Intractable Conditions, Nonspecific Symptoms, Frustrating Patients, More

COPD smoker Dept. of Bad Ideas..

By Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

Keeping up with the Web-sters. If you happen to use a Web reader of any sort to collect updates (feeds) from all your favorite nursing blogs and health care news sources in one place—we ran an article on using RSS feeds a while back, “RSS for the Uninitiated,” which will be free for the next month—you may know that Google Reader, long a convenient choice, will soon no longer exist. Here are 10 alternative readers you might want consider as replacements (and if you don’t use a reader already, you might want to try it).

A new kind of nursing blog. Nurse, artist, blogger Julianna Paradisi, who writes a monthly post for this blog, has just launched a new blog that will be narrated by a fictional nurse called Niki. This sounds like a really great idea that could go in a lot of potential directions.

Lyme disease continues to grow as a health threat in leafy environments further and further afield. It’s insidious, can attack the body in multiple ways, and there’s a huge amount of controversy about whether conventional short-term antibiotic treatments actually wipe it out or not. Many argue that it can be chronic, and that it’s often missed by the tests most often used to detect its presence. This article in the New Yorker gives a really good overview […]

2016-11-21T13:07:08-05:00June 27th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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On Difficult Truths, Anger, and Compassion: Recent Poems in ‘Art of Nursing’

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“Why couldn’t you leave cleanly?” asks the narrator of Ann Sihler’s poem, “Leavings,” featured in the June Art of Nursing. The poem, written in response to a suicide, speaks to the emotions of those left behind. Its central image, a pair of “oxblood loafers lying there / for all to see,” is somehow both mundane and horrifying. It’s a stark poem, suffused with the narrator’s anger; yet its lack of pretension also affords us  relief.

The married man with “schoolboy cheeks” in Nancey Kinlin’s poem, “Practicing at Post Office Square,” has just heard what no one wants to hear: “the result / is positive.” The poem, featured in July’s Art of Nursing, gives us the disclosure—from the nurse’s point of view. It’s a poem about mistakes and compassion, about what it feels like to be the one delivering bad news. Kinlin’s spare, clear writing doesn’t flinch from its difficult subject.

Both poems are free online (you’ll need to click through to the PDF files). We invite you to have a look, sit with them, and tell us what they evoke for you in the comments.

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2016-11-21T13:16:20-05:00July 30th, 2010|nursing perspective|0 Comments
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The Long Fall

I wish I could make sense out of why these events unfold on days that start out completely ordinary. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that our lives and goodbyes are completely unpredictable. And it occurs to me that, regardless of the starting height, all falls are “long falls,” and they all happen way too fast.

2016-11-21T13:17:13-05:00June 16th, 2010|Nursing, nursing stories|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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