THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 15, 1995 TAG: 9503140340
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
Tired, sometimes feverish and sneezing, patients sit on the porch of a World War I-era barracks, waiting to be seen in the outpatient clinic of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Once inside, out of the cold or heat, things aren't much better. Patients have little privacy for discussing intimate details of their ailments; cubicle walls fall short of the lowered ceilings - a design made necessary by the recent addition of air ducts, 100 years after the brick building went up.
This year, 185,000 visits to the doctor begin this way as sick veterans make their way through the dozen or so ambulatory care clinics now housed in two buildings that first served as barracks for a former old soldiers' home in Hampton.
Congress has approved a $29 million replacement for the clinics, but the drive to reduce the federal deficit has jeopardized the project. A House subcommittee has approved a bill rescinding $200 million in earlier allocations, including money for the Hampton project.
A full House vote is expected later this week.
``There is no question that a new facility is needed,'' said Dan Scandling, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Herbert H. Bateman. Bateman, who helped win the funding last year, hopes to dissuade fellow Republicans from removing it this year.
``The demand for outpatient care at the Hampton VA center has been rising steadily over the past several years, and will be even greater,'' Scandling noted.
One reason, says retired Navy Capt. Cornelius T. ``Connie'' O'Neill, is the aging veteran community.
``Those who served in World War II and the Korean War are in their 70s now,'' said O'Neill, adjutant with the American Legion in Virginia. ``They're old men who have . . . ills aggravated by age.''
The government has an obligation to these veterans, and to veterans of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, O'Neill said. The American Legion ``will go down fighting, guns blazing, to keep money that's already spent for the clinic,'' he said. ``This is not future funding - this is now.''
Lobbying to save the new clinic was high on the agenda at Friday's spring conference of the state American Legion in Virginia Beach, attended by about 1,000 Virginia members. The legion was established by Congress in 1919 to help care for war veterans, their widows and their children.
Discussion about a new outpatient clinic has gone on for nearly a decade at the medical center, which serves more than 150,000 veterans in an area from Williamsburg south to Elizabeth City, and from the ocean west to Suffolk. About two-thirds of them live in South Hampton Roads.
Half the center's patients are treated in the outpatient clinics. Another 30 percent require hospitalization and about 20 percent are placed in long-term and residential programs.
A new clinic would be a step toward bringing the Veterans Affairs complex into line with modern health care methods, said center director William G. Wright.
``It is anachronistic to try to do modern health care in 1910 buildings that are part of a 125-year-old setting built as an old soldiers' home for Civil War veterans,'' he said.
Parts of the clinic's wooden floors had to be torn out and replaced last year, at a cost of $60,000, because they were rotten and dangerous. The clinic's emergency department is the size of some living rooms, able to accommodate only three patients at a time. There are no privacy screens.
The project is called an addition, and would be connected to the back of the hospital. One of the two barracks would be torn down to make room for the work and the other would be converted for administration.
A design for the new clinic is complete, and the medical center staff holds out hope for a groundbreaking in summer 1996, Wright said. If the money comes through, and construction stays on schedule, the clinic would be finished in 1998. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
William G. Wright, director of the Hampton VA Medical Center, stands
in front of a drawing of the replacement for the center's aging
outpatient clinic. ``It is anachronistic to try to do modern health
care in 1910 buildings that are part of a 125-year-old setting built
as an old soldiers' home for Civil War veterans,'' he said.
by CNB