In an effort to honor members of the U.S. military, the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care recently launched a new membership category  for active military and Department of Veterans Affairs healthcare system workers.

“We’ve discussed reaching out and inviting VA and military healthcare workers to our organization for quite some time,” said Tina Thomas, AAWC executive director. “We have decided to recognize and honor them by providing a special, reduced-rate category of their own.”

The association also hopes that in creating a special category, which offers half-price professional dues, it will be better able to assess these members’ unique needs.

“After we achieve a larger core group of members within the VA/military category, we will invite these charter members to form a task force in order to help us to identify needs and develop resources to further reach out to [them],” Thomas said.

The association did something similar when it created a category for patients and lay caregivers—family and friends of patients—called Wounds in Need (WIN) several years ago. AAWC reached out individually to members in the new category to determine what they most wanted from the association. And once it started offering more specific benefits, AAWC saw the category grow from five members five years ago to approximately 135 today.

“Once we had assessed, obtained, and developed more resources for these members—as well clarified our message about why being part of AAWC would be beneficial to a layperson, which includes the ability to network with other members in their same situation—that’s when we saw significant growth,” Thomas said.

There’s already interest in the new military and VA category: Roughly 15 of AAWC’s almost 2,000 members have changed their status, and about 20 people have joined the association in that category since the announcement.

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