Army Veteran Takes Unusual Path To Nursing, Now Serves Others At UAB

By Adam Pope

As an Army reservist and photojournalist working on a story at a U.S. Army Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2009, Mary Lee, MSN, realized her true calling as a nurse.

“I got to see Army doctors, nurses and medics work, knowing what they did was really important, and that there was a great need for it,” Lee said. “I had always wanted to go to nursing school, and this sealed the decision for me. When I got back from that deployment, I enrolled at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing.”

Lee heard about the school’s Veterans Affairs Nursing Academy, the precursor to today’s VA Nursing Academic Partnership, its formal partnership with the veterans community and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs – particularly the Birmingham VA Medical Center. The school was one of the original 15 VA Nursing Academy sites in the United States, designated in 2009.The UAB School of Nursing has a long history of partnering, formally and informally, with the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve health care for veterans and their families.The school’s academic partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs is the only one nationwide made up of an undergraduate element, a graduate education element, and a primary mental health nurse practitioner residency element, and they are part of a full complement of programs designed to improve patient and family-centered care for veterans.

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