CloseUp

Veteran Health Closeup

Vanessa Williamson is the Policy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). IAVA is the country's first and largest nonprofit, non-partisan organization for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was founded in 2004 and has more than 85,000 active veteran members and grassroots supporters in all 50 states. Its mission is to improve the lives of America's newest generation of heroes and their families.

Vanessa has worked with IAVA since it was founded, and has collaborated with veterans from across the country on a wide variety of issues and initiatives. She oversees all of IAVA's legislative efforts, including preparing IAVA veterans to testify in front of Congress, and developing the IAVA Legislative Agenda.

Vanessa is the author of five newly-released issue reports (found here on IssueLab) which analyze the key challenges facing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families. The reports, which are frequently cited by the members of the media and leading policymakers, offer a comprehensive overview and sound policy solutions to the most urgent issues facing veterans. Learn more about the IAVA.

Dramatic advances in battlefield medicine have made war more survivable for the nearly 1.7 million U.S. service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. But hundreds of thousands of these troops are coming home with injuries. Thankfully, remarkable advances have been made in the area of prosthetics, burn, and polytrauma treatment. But some of the wounds of war aren't so visible, like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury, and can be life-altering without being physically apparent.

Recent work on psychological and neurological wounds has suggested that the prevalence of these invisible injuries is higher than expected and that brain injuries may interact with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

But many questions remain. How will DOD and VA coordinate to assure troops leaving the military do not experience a drop-off in care? What will be the long-term effects of blast injuries on the brain? How will female veterans' health needs be different, and how will those needs be addressed? What are the long-term effect of multiple deployments on family stability and health? What will the long-term costs be for veterans' health care?

These issues will be at the heart of veterans' health research in the coming years and are in fact taken up by many of the reports found here on IssueLab from non-governmental sources. I encourage you to explore some of these studies and comment on them as well. Nonprofits working in the area of direct service to veterans and in the policy arena will be tackling these issues for years to come.

If you know of studies, reports, demographics that should be on this site, please get in touch with IssueLab staff. And if you work for a nonprofit that is doing research in this area, please register your organization today to share your work with a broader audience.

See the complete list of research related to veteran health

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