Canada Wants to Expand PTSD Coverage to Nurses

Ontario wants to extend PTSD coverage to frontline nurses

Ottowa Citizen

Joanne Laucius

December 15, 2017

The Ontario Ministry of Labour wants to extend “presumptive” post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) legislation to include up to 140,000 frontline nurses.

If the proposal becomes law, it will cover the nurses for “stress and impairment to functioning,” including painful flashbacks, nightmares, outbursts and thoughts of suicide and guilt or sadness following a traumatic event.

There are up to 140,000 frontline nurses in Ontario. SUNMEDIA

“With the new proposed presumption, once a frontline nurse is diagnosed with PTSD by either a psychiatrist or a psychologist, the claims process for WSIB (Workplace Safety and Insurance Board) benefits will be expedited, and nurses will not be required to prove a causal link between PTSD and a workplace event,” said the ministry in a statement.

In April 2016, Ontario passed the Supporting Ontario’s First Responders Act, creating the “presumption” that PTSD diagnosed in first responders was work-related — so covered workers do not have to prove the link between their work and PTSD. 

The act covered about 73,000 first responders in the province, including police officers, firefighters, paramedics, corrections workers and dispatchers. But nurses were not included, sparking an outcry from the group.

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Army Nurse Served in Vietnam To Help Bring The Boys Home

Veteran profile: She enlisted during Vietnam War to help bring ‘the boys’ home
The Daily Courier
By Sue Tone
March 13, 2016

Like many Army nurses and combat veterans, Good said she didn’t talk about the fatalities, the wounded, the suffering. She tucked it away and went on to the next patient. But one can only tuck away so much.

Photo by Matt Hinshaw.

Sue Good is a veteran U.S. Army nurse who served in the Vietnam War.

Sue Good worked hard to keep “her boys” alive, never giving up on any of them without a fight. A nurse during the final years of the Vietnam War, she worked at the 95th Evacuation Hospital in Da Nang in 1971-72. She’s still dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 44 years later, although with help, its effects have lessened.

“I know what our boys are going through,” the 69-year-old Prescott resident said, folding her hands on her chest. “It breaks my heart.”

Good’s father served in the Army and Air Force – her brother served in the military, too – and the family moved a lot during her childhood. After a couple of years of community college, and aware of what was going on in Vietnam, she decided to join the Army as a nurse.

“My whole reason was to support the men when I saw them coming home,” she said. “My goal was to do anything in my power to bring them home. It was an eye-opener when I got over there.”

The base was “rocketed” nearly every night and Good feels it was just luck none fell on her. It was the first time she realized “somebody would be very happy to see me dead.”
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Army Nurse Died Trying To Save Wounded

Details of death of Army nurse in Afghanistan
ERIE TIMES-NEWS
APRIL 29, 2014

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — In her last moments of life, Army nurse Capt. Jennifer Moreno heard two orders.

One was a call to help a wounded soldier struck by a blast in a booby-trapped killing field at an Afghanistan bomb-making compound.

The other was a command to stay put lest she strike another mine in the bomb belt.

The nurse from Madigan Army Medical Center chose to help the wounded soldier, and gave her life trying.

In the words of her commander, Moreno ran "into hell" to rescue a comrade on the night she was killed. Newly released narratives of the Oct. 5 battle reveal the kind of hell Moreno and dozens of Army special operators found while trying to disrupt a plot to kill civilians in the city of Kandahar.

A total of 12 bombs exploded that night — a chain reaction that took the lives of four U.S. soldiers and wounded at least 25.

The fifth bomb killed Moreno, 25, of San Diego who volunteered for a dangerous assignment supporting special operators in combat.

The 11th bomb wounded three soldiers trying to recover her body.

Moreno is Madigan's only fatal casualty from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the hospital south of Tacoma has continuously deployed soldiers to medical facilities in combat zones.

Moreno "sacrificed her life so others could live," her Bronze Star commendation reads.
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Canadian Nurse with Combat PTSD talks about falling through the cracks

Stigma of mental health disorders in the military remains
Veterans with PTSD falling through the cracks might not be the ones you’d expect
OTTAWA CITIZEN
BY DRAKE FENTON
AUGUST 5, 2013

“I’m an ICU nurse. I couldn’t just be sitting behind a desk.”

Despite showing signs of what would later result in a medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, McDowell says, she “sucked it up” and returned to Kandahar for another six-month tour in 2008.

OTTAWA — There is a small framed photo of the Canadian War Memorial hanging in an office at the Royal Ottawa’s Operational Stress Injury clinic. Christine McDowell points to it and begins to cry.

“It hurts. Looking at that picture hurts,” she says. “When I see that and when I see people in uniform, I feel a loss. That was a big part of who I was.”

For an hour and a half she talks about her past life in the military, her three tours in Afghanistan and the thousands of casualties she treated as an Intensive Care Unit trauma nurse.

She can remember with striking clarity who she was and what she went through. She says those memories don’t fade.

They’re ever-present.

“I wouldn’t even call them flashbacks. I would call them ghosts,” she says.

It’s a slide show of faces: Canadian, America, Afghan, and even Romanian. At a base in Kandahar, in a hospital constructed of plywood, she looked down at all of them as they laid injured on one of the six ICU beds in the facility.

“We’re seeing hundreds and thousands of casualties,” she says. “I don’t know any civilian environment where one staff member would see as many amputated limbs as anyone who worked with us for six months.”
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Veteran credits nurse with saving his life in Long Binh Vietnam

Vietnam vet thanks nurse and others for saving his life
Chesterfield veteran credits nurse with saving his life in Vietnam Richmond Times-Dispatch
BY PETER BACQUÉ
July 5, 2013

Want to know what the Fourth of July holiday is really about?

Ask Bill Haneke. Ask Cathie Solomonson.

In 1968, during the Vietnam War, a mine nearly killed Haneke, who was an Army captain.

He lost his right leg, half his left foot, his left eye, half his nose and four fingertips from his right hand. His skull and his jaw were shattered. He had wounds over 90 percent of his body.

“I was Bill’s nurse,” Solomonson said. As a 22-year-old Army lieutenant, Solomonson served with the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, Vietnam, in 1968-69.
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Former combat nurse in Vietnam, calls attention to PTSD

Former combat nurse calls attention to PTSD
BY GGJOURNAL
JANUARY 21, 2013 By Nicole Shine
Garden Grove Journal

The suicide hotline at the Department of Veterans Affairs logs 10,000 calls a month. And the tally of suicides by active-duty military reached 349 in 2012, surpassing the number of troops killed in combat.

“There is a mental health problem among our vets,” Eileen Moore, a former combat nurse in Vietnam, said Thursday night.

Moore, now an appellate court judge, spoke to benefit the Vietnam War Museum of America Foundation, an effort to bring a Vietnam War Museum to Garden Grove.

Veterans’ suicides have made news of late, Moore noted, but the damage caused by war isn’t new. Each generation simply gives it a different name.

“In World War I it was called shell shock and in World War II doctors called it battle fatigue,” Moore explained. “After Vietnam, we called it post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Today many soldiers and vets don’t want to be labeled with something associated with a disorder, so they call it PTS.”

Although the name has changed, the problem has not, Moore said before a crowd that included many veterans.

She spoke of the homeless vets who now wander the streets, of vets behind bars, and of one Marine in particular whose murder conviction was upheld in her courtroom.

Suffering from untreated PTSD, “he drove under the influence of alcohol and severely injured a woman and killed her husband just a few miles from where we are now,” Moore said.
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Col. Florence Blanchfield's medals being donated to hospital

Blanchfield's medals being donated to hospital
Published: September 5, 2012
The Associated Press

FORT CAMPBELL, KY. — Relatives of Col. Florence A. Blanchfield are traveling to Fort Campbell to donate her remaining medals and awards to the hospital that was named for her 30 years ago.

Blanchfield Army Community Hospital says Blanchfield was the seventh chief of the Army Nurse Corps from July 1, 1943, until Sept. 30, 1947, and was known as one of the most influential nurses in military history. Under Blanchfield, the corps reached its all-time peak of 57,000 nurses.
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Col. Florence Blanchfield, 87; Ex-Head of Nurse Corps, Dies
May 13, 1971
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 12--Col. Florence A. Blanchfield, who as superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps directed 60,000 Army nurses in World War II, died today in Walter Reade Hospital. She was 87 years old and made her home with a sister, Mrs. Ruth Ordnoff in Arlington, Va.

Tribute to Heroism

Florence Blanchfield was the first woman to receive a commission in the Regular Army.

In making the presentation of her commission in a ceremony in 1947, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower paid tribute to the heroism of the Army nurses.

The War Department credited Colonel Blanchfield, who at the time had spent 30 years in the Army Nurse Corps, with being "largely instrumental in securing full military rank for nurses."

She marshaled her arguments for "full" rather than "relative" rank at hearings before a succession of Congressional committees. Full rank was won on a temporary basis in July, 1944, and was made permanent by the Army and Navy Nurse Corps Law of April 16, 1947.

Behind all the arguments was a matter of down-to-earth pay--or, in today's terms, should women earn less than men for the same work?

In March, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Mrs. Julia O. Flikke, Miss Blanchfield's predecessor as superintendent, as a colonel and Miss Blanchfield as a lieutenant colonel.

The Controller General then ruled that there could not legally be a woman colonel in the Army. He issued Colonel Flikke the pay of a major and Lieutenant Colonel Blanchfield the pay of a captain.

It took a new law to permit the rate of pay to catch up with the rank.
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100-Year-Old Recalls Life As WWII Army Nurse

100-Year-Old Recalls Life As WWII Army Nurse

Ora Pierce Hicks One Of 500 Black Nurses Serving At Time

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. -- There are not many people who make it to 100 and fewer still with a story like that of Ora Pierce Hicks.

KMBC's Bev Chapman reported that Hicks is a living legend to her family and to those who know about her service in World War II.

She is one of 17 children who grew up in a poor black family in Bogalusa, La. Hicks said her mother nursed the children of white women who couldn’t care for their own in order to make a little money.

Poverty didn’t stop Hicks from dreaming big. Hicks wanted to become a nurse. After working for two years as a school teacher and saving her money, she did it. She met a man who knew the director of a nursing school in Kansas City. He gave her a contact and in 1933, Hicks was enrolled. She graduated in 1936, returned home to Louisiana and probably would have stayed there working as a nurse were it not for the war.

“I heard on the radio that soldiers were dying because they didn’t have enough nurses,” Hicks said. “I wanted to help.”

She enlisted at a time when the Army was desperate for nurses, but not anxious to hire black nurses. They accepted Hicks and the experience changed her life.

One of her first posts was to a P.O.W. camp in Florence, Ariz. Later, she worked in a psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Hospital.

At the end of World War II, there were 50,000 in the Army Nursing Corps. Hicks was one of about 500 who were black. She rose to the rank of major before retiring.

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Life As WWII Army Nurse

War-zone nurses put their skills on the front line

Sunday, May 25, 2008
Angels of the battlefield

War-zone nurses put their skills on the front line

By Andi Esposito TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
aesposito@telegram.com


Severely injured with a tunneling wound through his liver, the Marine lay sedated, clinging to life, in the intensive care unit at the 399th Combat Support Hospital in Al Asad, Iraq, under the care of U.S. Army Reserve Lt. Melinda A. Nekervis of Sterling.

“He ended up getting well over 100 different blood products,” said Lt. Nekervis, a soft-spoken Army ICU and flight nurse who returned in October from Mosul and Al Asad, Iraq. When everything but whole blood was exhausted, Lt. Nekervis asked if the Marines keeping vigil would donate their own.

“They were more than willing to do that,” she said. “We transfused the buddies’ blood into the patient. It was quite a moving experience. We were very lucky not to lose him. He was pretty sick. They had to do surgery right at the bedside, and he survived.”


Stabilized, the Marine was later sent to Germany aboard an Air Force medical evacuation flight.

“I know that the doctors, from the extent of his injuries, didn’t know if he would make it and what his deficits would be,” said Lt. Nekervis, 32, who in civilian life is a registered nurse working in intensive care at UMass Memorial Medical Center — University Campus.

“I had him for four long days,” she said. “I will never forget him, but he will never remember me.”

Military nurses in Iraq and Afghanistan are a critical link in a chain of medical care that has enabled more soldiers to survive injury than ever before in the nation’s history of warfare. In World War II, about 30 percent of soldiers died from wounds, a rate that fell to 24 percent in the Vietnam War. Since the start of combat seven years ago in Afghanistan, and since 2003 in Iraq, more than 32,000 service members have been wounded in action. Statistics recently released by the Department of Defense show that 4,579 have been killed in action or died under non-hostile conditions during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

But the survivability rate — the portion of people dying from wounds on these fronts — has fallen to about 10 percent.

“We are doing such a good job saving soldiers that there is a much higher rate of survival,” said Col. Andrea J. Wallen, chairperson of the Department of Nursing at Worcester State College and chief nurse with the 804th Medical Brigade at Devens, which oversees the 399th and 12 other medical units.

Nurses and military medical experts say the survival rate is higher because soldiers wear more and better equipment, and because medical help has been pushed closer to the battlefront and dispersed into smaller teams reaching more locations. More people are being trained in lifesaving procedures, specifically in response to trauma; surgery is done earlier; and better communication has allowed medical equipment and supplies to be quickly sent where needed.

But most important is the speed at which the wounded are attended.

People are moved in record time by helicopters, aircraft and specially fitted flying hospitals — in C-17s and KC-135s — to higher-level or more specialized care in Germany and the United States, including Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, known for its burn center.

“The goal was to get the critically injured to Landstuhl (Regional Medical Center) in Germany within 72 hours,” said Lt. Nekervis, who also logged 50 hours of retrieving and nursing the wounded aboard a Blackhawk helicopter medevac air ambulance and earned a Bronze Star Medal for her service.

Much as Civil War soldiers called Oxford’s Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, “angel of the battlefield” for care she gave the injured in makeshift hospitals close to the battlefront, military nurses, often working under fire, help make the difference between life and death. Most are in the National Guard or Reserve on deployment from hospital and health care jobs. These weapons-carrying nurses, wearing Kevlar body armor, helmets and dressed in desert fatigues, are combat-ready professionals who, faced with the terrible consequences to flesh and bone of roadside bombs, guns and rockets, save lives under challenging conditions and at risk to their own safety.

Many have been deployed several times; most would go again in a moment.

“Battlefield nursing is about service, and if you can serve your country, make a difference and be a powerful force on the battlefield helping people, that is life-changing,” said Col. Bruce A. Schoneboom, a nurse anesthetist and acting dean of the Graduate School of Nursing of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Md. The school specializes in military and public health medicine and trains people for battlefield medicine in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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http://www.telegram.com/article/20080525/NEWS/805250617/1116

Walter Reed Hospital gets nurses to coordinate services for wounded

Nurses Coordinate Services for Wounded Soldiers
Marc Cantrell
Monday February 11, 2008
When the Washington Post broke the story of substandard housing and roadblocks to appropriate care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in February 2007, it was like an improvised explosive device went off in the military healthcare establishment. The reverberations left few parts of that complex untouched, and they’re still being felt today.

One of the many steps being taken by the Department of Defense (DoD) to ensure wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan receive appropriate and timely care includes the use of nurses and social workers as specialized case managers in military hospitals across the country.

The new case managers, called federal recovery coordinators, are responsible for coordinating care between different health professionals and departments and smoothing out the bureaucratic entanglements that can hinder a veteran’s recovery.

Federal recovery coordinators work closely with clinical and non-clinical case management teams in military hospitals to help develop and execute federal individual recovery plans, according to information from the DoD. The recovery plans specify what services are needed by the servicemember across the continuum of care from recovery through rehabilitation to reintegration to civilian life, according to the DoD. The coordinators work closely with family members to take care of their needs as well.

“Each of the services had already recognized the need for a single point of assistance for the severely injured, ill, and wounded,” says Kristin Day, a licensed clinical social worker and chief consultant of the Care Management and Social Work Service in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Office of Patient Care Services.
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Military Nurse and GIVING THANKS

GIVING THANKS
Name: RN Clara Hart
Posting date: 11/22/07
Stationed at: a military hospital in the U.S.
Email: clarahart2@yahoo.com


I held the hand of a soldier today and watched helplessly as he sobbed uncontrollably. I held the hand of a soldier and listened with growing horror to the litany of complaints; not sleeping, having nightmares, anxiety, dreading report for duty, uncontrolled crying, feeling irritable, not eating. I held the hand of a soldier and listened to him say, “I may not have been shot at or blown up but I also serve!”

As I looked into his red rimmed, tear filled eyes I thought, “You are a wounded soldier too." Because, you see, this wounded soldier is a United States Army Nurse.

This wounded soldier cares not only for other wounded soldiers but their families and their friends. This wounded soldier cares for not only the physical injuries but also the emotional injuries and social fallout that soon accompany. This wounded soldier sees the others being recognized for their injuries and is quick to say, “I don’t want to be given anything, the quilts, the coins, the clothes, the meals, the trips. I don’t want any of that."
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http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2007/11/this-wounded-so.html

After reading this, I feel really, really bad about not paying enough attention to the nurses and medics in combat. I include them in my thoughts and prayers, but honestly, I do not separate them the way I really should. This article offers a glimpse at the inclusion of nurses when we think about combat roles. I, among many, feel they should not be lumped in. To me, they are a truly special breed of individuals. They risk their lives just by being in the combat zones but they also have to try to take care of all the wounded brought to them. We need to remember, aside from the technological advances in medical care, without them, the survival rate would not be historically high.

I've seen many horrific images of the wounded. I cannot imagine seeing such suffering face to face. We need to remember how much they go through and why so many suffer after. Yes, even they get PTSD and yes even they get killed and wounded.