Florida Health News interviews USF Nursing’s Dr. Maureen Groer on women veterans’ health study

Florida Health News interviewed USF College of Nursing’s Gordon Keller Professor and Director of the Center for Women’s Health Research, Maureen Groer, RN, PhD, FAAN, on nursing health study for empowering women veterans.

Dr. Groer leads the women veterans’ research to explore the prevalence of reports of sexual assaults and extreme traumatic experiences among female veterans, and investigate how they cope with stress and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety.

“We were aware of literature showing that women veterans in the current conflicts were coming back with higher levels of PTSD,” Dr. Groer told the Florida Health News web site. “They are suffering difficulties in sort of transitioning back to civilian life.”

During the Empowering Women Veterans event held to celebrate and recognize military service women, 54 attendees voluntarily signed up to participate in the research.

“Our ultimate goal is to help women and to improve the health of women,” Dr. Groer told the Florida Health News’ web site. “To understand why there are risks for ill health in women veterans and what we can do to ameliorate that situation – alleviate the distress they may feel.”

The empowering women veterans’ study is part of RESTORE LIVES, which was established to develop evidence-based methods to help veterans and service members overcome psychological stress and other health problems that result from serving in combat operations.

Through a grant from the U.S. Army & TATRC, the RESTORE LIVES Center includes a total of five sub-studies, which aim to help improve the emotional health and quality of life among service members with disabilities, develop and evaluate treatments to complement services to the military provided by the VA Healthcare System, TRICARE and the conventional healthcare system.

For more information contact Maureen Groer at mgroer@health.usf.edu

To read full story go to HealthyState.org at “USF Studies PTSD’s Physical Effects on Female Veterans.”