When he got out of the service in 2012 after four combat tours, Joe Carney didn’t have much trouble finding work. However, the jobs available to him paled in comparison to the life-saving duties he had as an Army medic.“I was over-qualified for basic health-tech stuff,” said Carney, who today works in the emergency room at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (FHCC) in North Chicago. “I was told by four or five hospitals I was overqualified.”
At the same time, he didn’t have the credentials for jobs such as physician assistant or nurse practitioner. Carney decided to continue with the sports medicine college classes he began while he was still in the Army, and at the same time pursued getting into a VA program he heard about before he was discharged.
The intermediate care technician (ICT) program was piloted in 2012 in the Veterans Health Administration. The goal is to hire former military members who served as Army medics, Air Force medical technicians, and Navy and Coast Guard hospital corpsmen and help them capitalize on their valuable experience and continue working and progressing in the medical field.
A job as an ICT at Lovell FHCC was a good fit for Carney, who received his sports medicine degree in 2014 and continued with more college classes. Today, he is close to completing the prerequisites to enter the physician assistant (PA) program at Rosalind Franklin University Chicago Medical School.
Caring for Veterans, Servicemembers and their families made his transition to civilian life easier, Carney said. read more>>>
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