VA docs brush up on women's care

KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- The "show and tell" table at a gathering of doctors featured contraceptive sponges and female condoms. Life-size rubber pelvises and female breasts covered other tables in a windowless convention center ballroom. The lectures focused on topics such as how to help a rape victim feel comfortable in an exam room.

Not unusual for a doctors' meeting, but these were doctors and nurse practitioners with the Veterans Affairs Department, medical professionals who in the past might have gone years without seeing a female patient.

But avoiding topics like gynecology and breast exams is no longer possible because of an influx of female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan into the VA's system of hospitals and clinics.

Used to treating the men who served in Vietnam or World War II, some of the VA's practitioners are downright nervous about treating women.

The result has been limited availability at some VA clinics for gender-specific health appointments. Female veterans often drive hours to another facility, or the VA has to pick up the tab for them to go to a private doctor, if they opt to go at all.

So far, the VA has achieved its goal of having a trained, designated women's provider in its 150 medical centers and in at least 60 to 65 percent of its 900 community-based clinics. Doctors and nurse practitioners by the hundreds are coming to mini-residency programs like this one, focused on women's health.

"What we heard time and time again from providers that have been there so long is, 'I have forgotten since medical school how to do a lot of the women's specific care,' " said Dr. Robert Dorr, of the VA medical center in Saginaw, Mich.