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This study analyzed data from the 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine the association between unemployment status and physical health among a sample of 170,924 civilians and 12,129 veterans (aged 18-50 years). Multivariate regression analysis was used to test the interaction effect between employment status and veteran/civilian status on physical health. Veterans who were unemployed long term (longer than 27 weeks) reported a significantly greater number of days with poor physical health than civilians who experienced long-term unemployment. Timely prevention and intervention efforts to integrate veterans into the workforce could lead to substantially improved physical health outcomes. Public health policies and programs that are funded to assist veterans in securing and maintaining gainful employment can have lasting implications for their overall improved health and physical well-being.

This article explores the conceptual question of how to best integrate military culture and issues into social work education. Military service members, veterans, and their families are returning to civilian communities with the ending of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and seeking community-based providers for health and mental health treatments. Civilian social workers need to have an appreciation for the unique psychosocial stressors and needs of this population to be able to engage and intervene effectively with them. The military lifestyle and its demands require an understanding of topics that include coping and adaptation to stress, ecological and systems theories, family roles and functioning, community capacity to support the population, and the effect of these across the lifespan.Exigent means demanding attention, and when a situation is exigent, it generally calls for immediate and precise reactions based on thoughtful, well-informed decisions about what course of action to take next. The community of social work education has such a situation concerning how to best educate students and practitioners with regard to the needs of veterans, military service members, and family members affected as a result of that service. The purpose of this article is to offer suggestions for curriculum inclusion of material into the foundation courses of undergraduate and graduate social work programs. Although there are some schools that weave these topics into their required coursework seamlessly, we speculate that there are many that do not, and there has been no formal measurement nor exploration of this distinction. This disparity in the educational process across schools of social work leads to divergent competencies concerning a population with a unique culture and clinical presentation.The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) keeps a list of military social work specialty programs in schools of social work that self-report holding concentrations, certificates, or specialized courses on the topics. Formal monitoring of this list is difficult at best due to the changing nature of specialized programming, yet rigorous research methods into the specifics of these offerings would offer valuable analytic data to the field. Social work students who know they want to focus on social work with the military or veteran population typically apply for field internships at local Veterans' Administration (VA) hospitals or affiliated vet centers.

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As male veterans age, there are unique opportunities for health-related prevention efforts to be introduced throughout the life cycle to ameliorate the effects of chronic health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, asthma, arthritis, and diabetes. This study analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (2012) with a sample of 27,187 male veterans aged 65-84 years and 4,079 male veterans over 85 years of age. The study examined associations between behaviors, demographics, and five chronic health conditions with variables that included marital status, health insurance coverage, alcohol consumption, smoking history, and income levels. These associations varied between the two age groups, suggesting the need for intervention with veterans across their lifespans. Public health social workers could help veterans modify their health behaviors to prevent the occurrence or worsening of chronic health conditions over time and across the aging process.