Nursing Professor Christine Elnitsky Wins Alumni Award from Old Dominion University
In celebration its 50th Anniversary, the Old Dominion School of Nursing has honored seven alumni whose accomplishments have made a lasting impression and significant contribution to the nursing profession. Dr. Christine Elnitsky, an associate professor in the UNC Charlotte School of Nursing, received a Nursing Monarch Milestone Award for her career in veterans health advocacy.
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2017 edition of the ODU Nursing magazine, and is republished with the school’s permission.
by: Burton St. John
Christine Elnitsky, of Charlotte, North Carolina, had a military connection right from the beginning—she was born into a patriotic family at Ft. Riley, Kansas to an Air Force father. And this recipient of the Nursing Monarch Milestone Award for Advocacy also had very early connections to nursing and health. As a nursing assistant in a hospital, nurses noticed her approach to patients and families and encouraged her to use her talents in the profession. Elnitsky took that advice to heart and earned a BSN in 1991, an MSN in 1995 and a PhD in Urban Services-Health Services Research in 2001 (all from ODU).
Her graduate level work attuned her to an interest in health systems and delivery – and her military connection, to a large degree, drove that interest. Her father had served in WW II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. “He always made me feel safe, inspired, and protected and, thanks to him, I was always confident about the future,” she said. “But, like so many Vietnam era veterans, it seemed he never really came home.” Her husband served in the Navy during Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and the Iraq/Afghanistan war eras. From these experiences, Elnitsky’s career became focused on contributing scholarship to help service members reintegrate into civilian life.
She served 15 years in Veterans’ Administration (VA) research, completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the VA in San Diego, California and later serving as Assistant Director of Health Services Research at VA headquarters in Washington DC. She subsequently served at VA research centers of excellence at Tampa, Florida and then Minneapolis, Minnesota. Currently, as an associate professor at UNC-Charlotte, Elnitsky serves as a director of the Health Services Research doctoral program and continues doing research with the VAs in Salisbury, North Carolina and Portland, Oregon.
Over the last two decades, she has focused on providing access to health care services for veterans who experience physical injury (e.g., traumatic brain injury) and mental health injury (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder). This calls for collaborating with students, faculty, and community partners to coordinate community services for veteran reintegration. Elnitsky has headed funded research projects that evaluated veterans’ access to vocational rehabilitation and how that impacts their employment. Indeed, her research on access to care helped inform the Veterans’ Choice Act of 2014, which improves access to care in the VA and from non-VA providers for recently separated combat veterans.
Additionally, Elnitsky founded the Academy for Veteran and Military Health and developed annual veteran’s health conferences that bring in community partners to hear from regional, state, and national experts on veterans’ needs—all designed to disseminate more knowledge of veteran health needs into interprofessional curriculum. In great part, the conference came about as an outreach of her research findings that veteran students were reporting bias and stigma on campus that had negatively influenced their use of student health services. “Guided by my findings across projects, we have developed a model of barriers to care that may be applied to better understand the challenges faced by military and veteran populations,” she said. “It’s clear that veteran reintegration is a complex phenomenon that may be hindered or facilitated by both the individual and the wider domains of interpersonal relationships, community resources, and existing social policy.”
Elnitsky sees her research as pointing to knowledge that multiple disciplines can use to assist with veteran reintegration. “We’re concentrating on facilitation, or the process of fostering changes in individuals and organizations to implement evidence based practice,” she said. Her research continues to explore facilitation, both as a process and a series of discrete steps. This awareness of the importance of evidence-based practice informs her other current initiatives, whether designing her next conference (which will be on women veterans’ health needs), working with the VA to develop a virtual standardized patient, or mentoring new investigators and clinicians within interprofessional research teams.
How does Elnitsky keep at it? “Know yourself and your passion,” she says. “I come from a patriotic family that dates back to the Spanish-American War, so I believe that providing access to quality care for our service members is crucial. It is one way that we can honor our service members and veterans for their selfless valor.” And she’s especially passionate about integration, not only regarding veterans reintegrating back into their communities, but also about nursing making itself more available in a seamless way. She points to the example of health services being made available at ambulatory care centers, kiosks, and at retail sites “The fact is that hospitals are no longer the place to find all the patients,” she said, so “nurses need to be at the front leading the way, advocating for new and effective designs to provide services for those in need. Nurses have been on the front lines of all our country’s wars, and this war era is the next front line for the profession.” Through her work, Elnitsky demonstrates that she is, indeed, going beyond the hospital, finding how veterans, nurses, and the community together can break through barriers in a quest for better health.