Top 10 Veterans News from Around the Country 9-03-09

What’s Inside Today’s Local News for Veterans

1. Shinseki Announces Grant For Expansion Of Cemetery In Wisconsin.  
2. At Convention, Blind Veterans Discover Importance Of Leaning On Each Other.  
3. VA Experiencing "Unprecedented Demand" For Services.  
4. VA Clinic To Host Event For Iraq, Afghanistan Vets.  
5. Tracking Suicides By New Vets Said To Be A Problem.  
6. White House Aide A Voice For New Vets.  
7. Look At How VA Does Health Care.
8. VA A "Dramatic Example" Of Federal Government’s Need To Hire More Workers. 
9. Experts Dispute Claims About VA "Death Book."  
10. Cardiologists At DCVAMC Using Smartphone Application. 

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HAVE YOU HEARD?
They call it Warriors Walk, a ten-bed unit where a dedicated team of doctors and nurses to care for terminally ill veterans during the last days of their journey. The new hospice care facility is opening at the William Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia; SC. Warriors Walk will be dedicated to assisting veterans during the final months of their life, with a talented medical staff specially trained in end of life issues. The focus is on relieving pain, managing symptoms, and offering emotional and spiritual support to comfort terminally ill veterans. In addition to the nursing staff, Warriors Walk includes support areas where families and friends of the veterans can come and visit and spend time with their loved ones. They are encouraged to bring memorabilia and mementos to personalize the veterans’ space and make them feel at home. In addition to VA staff, Warriors Walk is supported by many special volunteers who give their time and energy to support the terminally ill. For the grand opening, the Daughters of the American Revolution stitched blankets for every room to make it more like home for the veterans. The VA always strives to give the best care and support to our veterans’ that is possible. This is the last care they will receive and Warriors Walk staff is working hard to ensure it is of the highest quality and comfort.

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1.      Shinseki Announces Grant For Expansion Of Cemetery In Wisconsin.   The Business Journal Of Milwaukee (9/3) reports the US Department of Veterans Affairs "is providing a nearly $4 million grant to expand the Southern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Union Grove. The cemetery expansion grant will pay for the entire development of a 22-acre parcel, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki announced Wednesday." The "105-acre cemetery, about 30 miles south of Milwaukee, was established with the assistance of a VA grant in 1996." 

2.      At Convention, Blind Veterans Discover Importance Of Leaning On Each Other.   The Portland (OR) Tribune (9/3, McFadden) reports US "soldiers blinded in battle or by disease are adjusting to life’s challenges by leaning on each other. That’s one of the things they discovered during a five-day convention of blinded veterans last month in Portland." The Tribune notes that the event, the Blinded Veterans Association’s 64th National Convention, "featured speeches" by Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski "and retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, the US Secretary of Veterans Affairs."  

3.      VA Experiencing "Unprecedented Demand" For Services.   The online Christian Science Monitor (8/30, Lubold, 52K) reported, "With hundreds of thousands of veterans…trying to get help," the Department of Veterans Affairs "is experiencing an unprecedented demand for its services." Even "with a heavy infusion of funding – a 50 percent increase since 2006 – the VA has been hard-pressed to meet veterans’ needs." And, while President Barack Obama "has outlined yet more funding," the "question remains: Will a new generation of vets get the resources and help it is likely to need from the VA for years to come?" The Monitor added, ‘"They are indeed in a hole,’ says a staffer on Capitol Hill familiar with the VA issues, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the subject." 

 4.      VA Clinic To Host Event For Iraq, Afghanistan Vets.   The Cape Coral (FL) Daily Breeze (9/3, Cassidy) reports, "Lee County veterans of Operation Enduring and Iraqi Freedom are invited to a Welcome Home Informational Fair" at the Fort Myers Veterans Affairs Clinic "next weekend." The VA "and other organizations are offering the informational fair…to educate returning veterans about available benefits and services." 

5.      Tracking Suicides By New Vets Said To Be A Problem.   The Indianapolis Star (9/3, Marshall, 241K) asks, "How many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have come back, haunted by memories of war and struggling to cope with life at home, and taken their own lives? Nobody knows," and therein "lies one of the most serious obstacles to preventing suicides by returning veterans. A 2008 Congressional Research Service Report on the issue put it
bluntly" when it said, "There is no nationwide system for surveillance" of veteran suicides. The Star adds, "Recognizing the crucial gap in data, the Army and the National Institute of Mental Health have partnered for a five-year, $50 million study on military suicides." The Department of Veterans Affairs, meanwhile, "has launched" a "10-year health study examining 60,000 ‘new’ veterans, mostly those involved" in Iraq and Afghanistan operations.
      DOD Forms Task Force On Prevention Of Suicide.   In the lead story of her "Military Intelligence" column for the Frederick (MD) News-Post (9/3), Megan Eckstein notes, "The Department of Defense on Monday named 14 military and civilian experts to a Force on the Prevention of Suicide by Members of the Armed Forces to help deal with the high suicide rate among active duty service members." The "new task force will spend the next 12 months looking for trends in suicide data and finding ways to update prevention and education programs. Their results and recommendations will eventually be sent to Congress."
      Iraq Vet Threatens To Kill Himself During Standoff With Police.   The Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger (9/3) noted that 23-year-old Iraq veteran Torrance Burnett, a resident of Vicksburg, Mississippi, recently "engaged police in a nearly four-hour standoff outside Vicksburg Municipal Court after being sentenced…on a domestic violence charge." Burnett "walked out of the courtroom after being assigned to counseling, went to his car and retrieved an automatic handgun, Chief Walter Armstrong said." Upon "seeing police, Burnett ran, the chief said. Officers chased him for a block before Burnett…pointed the gun at his own head. ‘He kept it there for three or four hours,’ Armstrong said," adding that after hostage negotiators convinced Burnett to lower his weapon, the veteran was "admitted to the VA hospital in Jackson."
      VA Conducts PTSD Study On Minnesota Guard Members.   The St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press (9/3, Olson) reports, "A new study by PTSD experts at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center found 16 percent of Minnesota Guard members had ‘probable PTSD’ when they returned from Iraq." The study, which was "based on surveys of 522 Guard members," also "found characteristics they believe predicted which returnees were most at risk. Not surprisingly, a high rate of returnees with PTSD symptoms reported exposure to combat. More surprising," however, "was the strong influence of social support. Guard members were more likely to suffer PTSD if they felt a lack of that support back home and if they had neurotic personalities and negative outlooks before deployment. The study also found a modest correlation with gender," because while "14 percent of surveyed men had probable PTSD, the rate jumped to 22 percent for women. VA researchers presented the results Wednesday at a military research conference in Kansas City, Mo."
      Virtual World Being Created To Help Vets Suffering From PTSD.   NextGov (9/2, Brewin) reports, "Combat veterans rarely talk about their most searing hidden emotions and thoughts caused by their experiences in battle, a reticence that can lead" to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Now, however, the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) "at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles is near completing Coming Home, a virtual world in Second Life that its creators hope will help break down the barriers to PTSD
treatment, said Jacquelyn Morie, a project leader at ICT." NextGov noted that before getting started on the Second Life project, ICT "developed a virtual world that features immersive therapy, which mental health professionals can use to treat Iraq combat veterans suffering form PTSD called Virtual Iraq."
      Study: Drug May Relieve Combat Nightmares.   MedPage Today (9/2, Neale) reported, "Prazosin, a drug originally developed to lower blood pressure but used to treat veterans" with PTSD "for years, appeared to reduce debilitating trauma nightmares in soldiers deployed to Iraq in a small, open-label study. In 13 soldiers treated at a combat stress unit in northern Iraq, there was a significant reduction in mean scores for trauma nightmares and disturbed sleep…according to Murray Raskind, MD, of the Seattle Institute for Biomedical and Clinical Research." Raskind, who reported the study’s results "at the Military Health Research Forum" in Kansas City, Missouri, "said a large, placebo-controlled study to further assess the efficacy of prazosin in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is underway at Ft. Lewis, Wash. and Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. However, he said, about 26,000 Vietnam veterans are already taking prazosin for chronic PTSD, and military physicians have been giving the drug to soldiers in combat since about 2005."
  

6.      White House Aide A Voice For New Vets.   The Washington Post (9/3, Rucker, 652K) says 29-year-old Matt Flavin, "director of the new White House Office of Veterans and Wounded Warrior Policy," is the Administration’s "liaison to the nation’s roughly 23 million veterans. For a president with no military experience, he orchestrates outreach to the politically prized constituency," but, in a "community dominated by veterans of the Vietnam War, Flavin embodies a generational change. He and the few other" Administration "officials who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan — including Tammy Duckworth, an assistant secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs — offer a voice in Washington for the men and women fighting in today’s conflicts." The Post adds, "Leaders of veterans service organizations said they have been surprised by how frequently Obama meets with them and his willingness to include their views in drafting his policies. Flavin seems to keep such leaders on speed dial." 
  

7.      Look At How VA Does Health Care.   In a Merced (CA) Sun-Star (8/28) op-ed, Al Perry, "director of the Veterans Administration Central California Healthcare System in Fresno," wrote, "Let’s agree, escalating health care costs are bankrupting America while 47 million Americans remain uninsured. The
solution: provide higher quality care at lower cost." Perry went on to argue that the VA provides a good example of such a solution. He said this is so because quality of VA "care is now better than the private sector for the same diseases according to the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard and others (Fresno’s VA ranks in the top 5 percent among all VAs); cost per patient is below the private sector; patient satisfaction has exceeded the private sector since 2000, according to independent studies; advanced technology, including VA’s highly acclaimed electronic medical record — now adopted by Finland and Germany — won the Harvard Innovation in Government Award; a culture of safety and aggressive performance measurement is recognized by industry experts as the gold standard; care is provided at more than 1,400 sites across the country; half the physicians in America train at VA; and VA researchers develop advances from CT scanners to prosthetic limbs to post-traumatic stress disorder treatment."  

8.      VA A "Dramatic Example" Of Federal Government’s Need To Hire More Workers.   The Washington Post (9/3, Vogel, 652K) reports, "The Federal government needs to hire more than 270,000 workers for ‘mission-critical’ jobs over the next three years, a surge prompted in part by the large number of baby-boomer Federal workers reaching retirement age, according to the results of a government-wide survey being released Thursday." The "medical and public health area is most in need of hires, according to the study," which was conducted by a think thank called the Partnership for Public Service. Max Stier, the organization’s president and chief executive, "described the Department of Veterans Affairs as a ‘dramatic example’ of an agency with pressing needs, as a result of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. VA, according to the report, will need more than 48,000 hires over the next three years, including 19,000 nurses and 8,500 physicians." The Post‘s (9/3, Davidson) "Federal Diary column adds, "Stier…told us that the 273,000 jobs would represent a 41 percent jump in critical hiring over the past three years, with the health and security professions and the departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and Defense leading the way."  

9.      Experts Dispute Claims About VA "Death Book."   In continuing coverage, the Miami Herald (9/3, 224K), running a story syndicated by McClatchy (9/3, Adams), reports, "While Republicans are calling a Department of Veterans Affairs health planning booklet a ‘death book’ that encourages veterans to kill themselves or forgo care, ethicists and legal and medical experts say it’s a reasonable attempt to help America’s veterans plan for the end of their lives." For example, the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan, "one of the nation’s leading bioethicists," said, "There is nothing in this pamphlet or in any of the VA effort in this area that is aimed at asking that veterans be allowed to die to save money," and to "say otherwise is just an exercise in ludicrous, inflammatory rhetoric." VA "critics, however, say the book is flawed because a VA physician and ethics official they say advocates physician-assisted suicide helped write it." But Robert Pearlman, the physician in question, said he is "not an advocate for physician-assisted suicide," which, he pointed out, is "impermissible in the VA."
      But, in an op-ed for the Fort Myers (FL) News-Press (9/3), Dr. John Walker, a Fort Myers resident, disagrees with Pearlman’s contention, stating, "In July, the Obama Administration reinstituted end-of-life planning" at the VA "using the guide, ‘Your Life, Your Choices.’ The primary author of this is Dr. Robert Perlman, who has strongly advocated physician-assisted suicide and is a strong healthcare rationing supporter. The primary resource" for the guide, meanwhile, "is the Hemlock Society, an organization advocating euthanasia, according to Mr. Jim Towey in The Wall Street Journal on August 19, 2009. Obviously, the Administration is strongly supportive of this concept." 
 

10.    Cardiologists At DCVAMC Using Smartphone Application.   PC World (9/3, Sacco, 604K) says "wireless technology is really just now coming of age in the medical field. That seems to be changing, however," as "doctors and nurses are surrendering their antiquated gadgets of yesterday in exchange for today’s powerful, cutting-edge smartphones, says Fraser Edward, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion’s (RIM) Manager of Market Development for Healthcare." In "fact, 11…cardiologists" at the Washington D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center (DCVAMC) "have been successfully using a custom BlackBerry application for heart-specialists for more than six months." According to PC World, the US VA "’has been on the cutting-edge of technology advancement for the past decade,’" Dr. Divya Shroff, chief of staff for informatics at the DCVAMC, "says, citing its widespread use of electronic medical records (EMR), as an example. The DCVAMC’s Electrocardiogram (EKG) Smartphone Project is just the latest illustration of the VA’s commitment to medical technology, according to Shroff."