VA clinic coming back, VA Cheyenne chief tells Sterling vets

The part-time VA clinic is coming back to Sterling, and that’s just to start.

Officials from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cheyenne, Wyo., were in Sterling Wednesday for a town hall meeting with local veterans. They addressed the future of VA medical care availability for northeast Colorado for a standing-room-only crowd of vets at the Logan County Courthouse.

The session, which lasted a little over two hours, addressed the recent suspension of the twice-weekly VA clinic on the Northeastern Junior College campus, and presented information on services that will be available going forward.

Paul Roberts, Medical Center Director at Cheyenne, started the session by announcing the return of the NJC clinic, one day a week at first, but expanding as staffing grows.

“On Feb. 15, the nurses are coming back out to NJC,” Roberts said. “We’re going to do a better job, even better than before the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re going to take (service to Sterling) to the next level.”

That next level will include in-home nursing visits for those who need it, Roberts said, and his staff is trying to recruit enough nurses to open a permanent, five-day-a-week clinic in Sterling.

Roberts explained that the VA was hit hard by COVID-19, sidelining as many as 65 percent of the Cheyenne facility’s staff. That required Roberts to pull staffers into the hospital and regroup to keep that facility up and running. With the pandemic pretty much behind them, Roberts said, he and his staff are rebuilding their workforce to offer more and better care options.

“There’s a movie quote I like, it goes, ‘It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.’ We’re getting busy living,” Roberts said.

Some of the options the VA is looking at are a full-time clinic in Sidney to augment Sterling, video links between Sterling and Cheyenne, using the new facility in Denver, and having the VA pay for care in the vet’s own community.

Roberts was accompanied by a phalanx of managers and directors from the Cheyenne hospital, and each in turn talked about changes being made in care levels. Many of the changes the VA hospitals are starting to offer mirror services already offered by private sector health providers such as online access and diagnostics, prescription tracking and remote medicine.

Most of the time was taken up with questions and comments from veterans. One idea that Roberts had floated – permanently setting up a mobile care van in Sterling – got little support from the crowd. One vet said he’d had too many bad experiences with breakdowns and cancelled visits to have faith in the van concept.

Roberts and his staff were able to clear up a number of misunderstandings and questions during the Q&A period, including getting VA-paid prescriptions for those on Medicare, local hospitals not getting paid by VA for veterans’ care, and local physicians giving poor service to veterans under VA care.

Prescriptions present a particularly thorny problem for the VA because many vets don’t understand their options. Veterans do not have to choose between VA prescription drug benefits and a Medicare prescription drug plan; they may have either or both. Negotiating the VA drug plan can be a challenge, however, and the Cheyenne staffers offered a number of suggestions for getting improved service.

After the formal town hall meeting, many members of the crowd met individually with Roberts and his crew to get assistance with specific problems they’re having. The staff members will take the information they got from the town hall back to Cheyenne and figure out what changes need to be made to address the concerns raised at the town hall.

Roberts told the Journal-Advocate afterward that even the Northeast Colorado Health Department wants to work with the VA to improve veteran health care.

“It’s really gratifying to see the local community respond like this, Roberts said. “Like we said in the Army, ‘One team, one fight.’”

Kerri Puckett, Public Affairs Specialist

Phone: