ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Registration is open for the Association of the U.S. Army’s Hot Topic event Dec. 7. 

“Holistic Health and the Soldier: An Army Medical Hot Topic” is an in-person, daylong event that will take place at AUSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Throughout the day, attendees will be able to participate in a professional dialog with Army leaders, industry and academia as they explore Army medicine’s support of the service’s operational missions and readiness.

The Army is seeing an uptick in interest as more people get vaccinated against COVID-19, a senior Army medical leader said.

“We have people from previous tiers in the schema that have come forward to get vaccinations, and we believe that that’s due in large part to the education and the materials we put out,” said Maj. Gen. Jill Faris, interim deputy chief of staff for operations for Army Medical Command.

The Army is working tirelessly to help the nation fight COVID-19—and it still has a way to go, according to Army Medicine’s top general.

“I've been able to witness firsthand how our Army medical professionals have worked to ensure that we have healthy soldiers, healthy workplaces and healthy communities across the nation,” Lt. Gen. R. Scott Dingle, Army surgeon general, said Oct. 14 during a media roundtable at AUSA Now, the 2020 virtual annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army. 

Despite spending millions on recruiting, educating and training almost 15,000 active-duty physicians and dentists every year, the Defense Department continues to face challenges retaining personnel in some key specialties, partly because of pay, according to a new report.

Consolidation and reform of the military health care system remains a priority for Congress.

In a report accompanying the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, negotiators who worked on the bill said they “are aware of a lack of consensus in the [Defense] Department on implementing the reforms required by law but see no reason to change direction.”

Army surgeon and NASA astronaut Col. Andrew Morgan lifted off to space July 20 aboard the Soyuz MS-13 crew ship, exactly 50 years after Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon after Apollo 11’s historic landing there.

On his first journey into space since being chosen in 2013 to become an astronaut, Morgan flew with two veteran crewmates from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station. He is scheduled to be there until April 2020 while he works on hundreds of continuing experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and earth science.

Almost 18,000 uniformed health care jobs—including those of doctors, dentists, nurses, medics and administrative staff—could be cut from across the services because of reductions proposed in the Defense Health Program portion of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2020 budget request.

How this might affect the Army is not yet fully known.

“This is an area we’ve been working on very closely with the services,” Navy Vice Adm. Raquel Bono, director of the Defense Health Agency, told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee on April 3.