Colonel Dawn M. Harl, US Air Force, Nurse Corp
Altus Air Force Base, Altus Oklahoma, USA
AIR FORCE NURSE
Military Medical Leader
Colonel Dawn M. Harl, US Air Force Nurse Corp is my wife. I have this philosophy in life "if you can't be a nurse – marry one." We were married before I came into the Air Force. It only took me being transferred with the Air Force twice for my wife to figure out, every time I moved she started at the bottom of the work schedule at some new hospital. So, after I was in the Air Force for a year and a half, my wife joined. She came in as a first lieutenant while I was still struggling to get past being a "baby" second lieutenant, and out ranked me the rest of my military career.
She originally joined the active duty Air Force for three years, because joining the Air Force Reserve was a six year commitment. Twenty four years later she is still an Air Force nurse and I am her old, eccentric retired dependent husband.
As a military nurse, if you only want to do hands on patient care, you are working for the wrong HMO. You are hired because you are a nurse, but you are a commissioned officer first and then a nurse. The first couple of years of your military nursing career you will be performing direct patient care, but whether you wanted it or not, you find you have people working for you. The military uses medical technicians in direct patient care and even as the most junior nurse working a floor you will find yourself in charge of people.
In charge means leadership and this is where the officer part of military nursing comes in. You start leading troops right away and it never stops until you retire from the Air Force. If you do not want to take on the responsibility of leadership do not become a career military nurse. I doubt most nursing education programs teach much leadership, but you will acquire that skill very rapidly or you will move back into the civilian world of health care. Military nurses become outstanding leaders, however it has taken the Air Force a while to figure that out and then they consumed more time acting on the obvious.
When my wife entered the Air Force in 1981 only doctors could be military medical commanders. Think of Colonel Sherman T. Potter in the old M.A.S.H. TV series. He was the "doc" so he was in charge. Major Margaret "Hotlips" Houlihan had plenty of military leadership skills, but she was a nurse and there was no way they would put her in command. In the military when you attend a training course they check your date of rank and whoever is senior becomes the class leader of that course. In 1984 my wife attended an Air Force eight week leadership class called Squadron Officers School. My wife was the senior person in the class but because nurses could not command, she was not allowed to even be the class leader.
Times have changed. Nurses along with dentists and military medical administration officers can now be commanders. Somebody finally figured out that all the natural leadership skills a military nurse must acquire on the job, can be effectively channeled into commanding a medical unit. There have been times in the past ten years when close to half the medical units in the Air Force were commanded by nurses. Now we are at war. The Air Force does not have M.A.S.H. units, they have Expeditionary Medical Squadrons. Since September 11, 2001 our big Air Force has been deploying these units into the heart of the war on terrorism. Six of these field units have been commanded by senior nurses. Major "Hotlips" Hoolihan would be proud.
The biggest nursing concern in the Air Force is the same as the civilian nursing world, finding and recruiting qualified Bachelor Degree prepared RNs. The Air Force has not met its recruiting goal in the past five years. I know that there are some locations in this country that a new graduate nurse can make more money than a new Air Force nurse, but that does not last long as a nurse in the military progresses in a twenty year career.
As an experienced civilian nurse you will be hard pressed to come close to the money a nurse makes as a Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel in the military. With few exceptions you will never be offered the leadership roles in your civilian nursing that are found in military nursing, while you are still under the age of forty. This is not an article about nurse recruiting; it is about the need and the excellent demonstration of military medical leadership. As all branches of our armed services spend more time deployed to the far reaches of the globe, there will continue to be a need for military medicine and strong medical leaders. There is no question that Air Force nurses will meet and exceed those expectations.