Clinic
Access to health care should become easier for our area’s 16,000 military veterans with the opening of a VA clinic in Fayette County. Robert Hixson of the county’s Veterans Affairs office confirmed a health clinic would be opened and that its creation could proceed rapidly. This is good news to vets who have been forced to wait for appointments and then travel, mostly to Pittsburgh, to seek medical treatment.
The clinic is expected to be in keeping with the new shift by Veterans Affairs to move away from gigantic central hospitals that require costly upkeep and substantial travel by patients to smaller health-care clinics that bring primary medical services to where the patients are.
Not all are happy with the shift. Some veterans fear that the services, such as those for mental health, might be crippled with the closing of a Pittsburgh facility that specialized in psychiatric care. This needn’t happen.
The new clinics, such as the one that will come to Fayette, will include mental health services. And easier access might encourage more vets to seek treatment sooner for all ailments, physical and mental.
It is not yet known where the clinic will be based. Hixson said that the location will be determined through a bidding process. We would hope that it would proceed quickly.
We can’t help but recall that a few years ago Fayette County officials felt that they were spurned when passed over for a veterans’ cemetery. As fitting as it would have been for the county to pay tribute by hosting a final resting place to honor vets, a clinic to keep the living healthy is so much more welcome.