January 17, 2012 – EnableAmerica.org

Enable America, a nonprofit group working to improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities, honored more than two dozen North Carolina businesses and social service organizations for their support of that mission, in an awards ceremony Friday at the North Carolina Governor’s Mansion.

“The work that we do, and by that I mean all of us here today, not only improves employment opportunities for people with disabilities, it also opens new avenues of social inclusion for those who must cope with life altering disabilities,” said Chris Jadick, Enable America’s Executive Director. “As a result of your efforts, we are collectively working to make North Carolina a state where anyone and everyone can pursue and achieve the America Dream.”

Enable America produces programs that open employment opportunities for people with disabilities, including disabled veterans and wounded warriors. It established permanent operations in North Carolina in 2009, and since then has produced a series of mentoring events and job seeker workshops that help people with disabilities connect to the workplace.

Those programs would not be possible without the participation of businesses committed to diversity in the workplace, and North Carolina social service organizations that serve the disability community. For those efforts Enable America honored 17 North Carolina businesses and 14 service organizations at the event.

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The mission of the Soldiers and Airmen’s Assistance Fund is to provide financial aid to our North Carolina National Guard Soldiers, Airmen and their families coping with extreme difficult situations.

The National Guard consists of Citizen-Soldiers and Airmen providing protection from natural disaster, training regularly to uphold high standards of readiness, and deploys to far-away countries to protect the United States’ national interests abroad.  It is important that these men and women know that we are grateful for the many sacrifices they and their families endure to protect us and our country.  We fully support them in their mission to keep America safe.

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January 13, 2012 – American Forces Press Service

More than 1,000 military spouses were on the job hunt today at the nation’s largest hiring fair and career forum dedicated solely to career-seeking military spouses.

Dressed in suits and with resumes in hand, spouses from all branches of service browsed more than 100 employer booths — from banks and credit unions to medical and technology companies — at the Hiring Our Heroes Military Spouse Career Forum, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center here.

The chamber launched the Hiring Our Heroes program in March as a nationwide effort to help veterans and spouses find employment. While the chamber aims to host 100 veteran and spouse career fairs across the nation in a year — with 83 undertaken so far — this spouse-only fair was the first of its kind.

The turnout exceeded even the chamber’s expectations, said Laura Dempsey, senior advisor of military spouse employment for the chamber’s Hiring Our Heroes program.

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January 12, 2012 – Whitehouse.gov

One-hundred thirty of the nation’s medical and osteopathic colleges—105 medical colleges and 25 osteopathic colleges—have made a commitment to our service members who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental-health issues. These 130 schools will begin training their students to recognize and treat these injuries, as well as participate in research to better understand them.

Post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries—two signature injuries of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—affect 1 in 6 of our veterans. In order to help the issues our service members are facing, we need doctors and professionals who have a fundamental understanding of PTSD and TBI.

This commitment to support our veterans and their families, part of First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden’s Joining Forces initiative, is the largest of its kind from American medical schools. It will help leverage the full capacity of our nation’s health care providers to improve care for our nation’s veterans, service members, and military, and help to train the nation’s future physicians on military cultural issues. These schools will develop new research and clinical trials so that we can better understand and treat PTSD and TBI, and collaborate to share information and best practices.

Our veterans, servicemen and women—and their families—have served this country in extraordinary ways. Now it’s time for us to serve them as well as they have served us.

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January 12, 2012 – American Forces Press Service

A team of experts at San Antonio Military Medical Center here has launched a military study aimed at improving outcomes for service members suffering from a signature wound of today’s wars: traumatic brain injury.

The Study of Cognitive Rehabilitation Effectiveness, dubbed the SCORE trial, is examining cognitive rehabilitation therapy’s value as a treatment for service members with mild TBI.

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments teamed up on this study to determine the best treatment for combat troops who are experiencing mild TBI symptoms — such as difficulties with attention, concentration, memory and judgment — three to 24 months post-injury, explained Douglas B. Cooper, the study’s lead and a clinical neuropsychologist for the center’s Traumatic Brain Injury Service.

“We have a lot of great interventions to help … in the first few days after concussion,” he said in an interview with American Forces Press Service. “We can pull them out, get them rest and get them better.”

However, “we don’t have as many good interventions later on –six months, 12 months or two years post-injury,” acknowledged Cooper, who also serves as the director of the Military Brain Injury Rehabilitation Research Consortium.

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