PROVIDENCE – Women military veterans are one of the fastest-growing populations of new Veterans Administration users. Dr. Vinita Goyal, who was named Nov. 1 the Women’s Reproductive Health Research Scholar at Women & Infants Hospital, will focus her research on the gaps in the provision of women’s health care, particularly on the availability of contraception.
“Many female military veterans are choosing to seek health care within the VA system,” Goyal said. “There are gaps in the provision of women’s health care within the VA system that the government is committed to understanding and addressing. Much progress has been made, but we still have a long way to go.”
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Currently, for example, a female veteran in Rhode Island who wants an intrauterine device for birth control cannot get one placed at the Providence VA; she must go to Boston or New Haven, Goyal said.
“Researching the current state of women’s health services afforded by veterans’ hospitals, including contraception services, can lead to better health care for our female veterans,” she said. Women veterans, she continued, “are now being recognized as a very important part of the veteran population. The VA is really committed to making sure that happens.”
According to Thomas Antonaccio, public affairs officer at the Providence VA Medical Center, in fiscal 2010, there were 31,000 veterans using the center’s services, 29,700 men and 1,300 women. “The number of female veteran users [is on the] rise,” Antonaccio said, in part as a result of the hiring of a Women Veterans program manager to provide outreach and advocacy.
Goyal is a member of the medical team in Women & Infants’ Division of Ambulatory Care and Women’s Primary Care Center and an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
As a scholar, she will be able to devote about 75 percent of her time on research efforts over the next two to five years. She will be working with principal investigator Joanna M. Cain, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Women & Infants, and research director Maureen Phipps, who is serving as a primary mentor. “The WRHR scholars program is an incubator that allows these brilliant young doctors to push their ideas in the hopes of improving lives for women,” Cain said.
The scholar program was begun in 1998 by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. In 2005, Women & Infants and Brown University were awarded one of the competitive grants.
