Joan Furey

Joan Furey was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1946 and grew up in Terryville, a small town on Long Island. She graduated from the Pilgrim State Hospital School of Nursing, in Brentwood, in September 1967. In June 1968, she was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps. 

Upon completing basic training Ms. Furey was assigned to Letterman General Army Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco, California. She worked in the emergency room and the recovery room, where she cared for many injured who were evacuated from Vietnam. While at Letterman, she volunteered for duty in Vietnam and was deployed there in January 1969. 

Ms. Furey served the Department of Veterans Affairs for 30 years, in a variety of positions in nursing service, nursing administration and nursing education. As a nurse at the VA Medical Center in Bay Pines, Florida, she was very involved in the early grassroots efforts to improve health care services to both women and Vietnam veterans. 

In 1989, Ms. Furey became the Associate Director for Education at the VA’s newly established National Center for PTSD in Menlo Park, California. She continued her advocacy for improving VA services for women veterans, and while there, she co-founded the first inpatient PTSD treatment program for women veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs. This got the attention of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which it included as its cover story, “How to Bandage a War.” 

Ms. Furey served as Director of the VA’s newly established Center for Women Veterans from 1994 to 2001. She has been sought after as a consultant on many national research projects focusing on women veteran’s issues, both inside the VA and in the private sector. In addition, she has received many awards – the Department of Veteran Affairs Exceptional Service Award in 2000 and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Distinguished Career Award when she retired in 2004. 

Currently, Ms. Furey resides in Sayville, where she remains active in veterans’ activities through Sayville Post 433 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.