History

Our History

The VA Long Beach Healthcare System began in the San Fernando Valley's city of Van Nuys at the Birmingham General Hospital during World War II. The Army used this hospital as a major reception center for military personnel wounded in the Pacific Theater. Following the war, in April of 1946, command of this installation was transferred to the Veterans Administration.

Four years later on June 1, 1950, the entire hospital and staff were moved to the city of Long Beach in the present location to occupy a deactivated U.S. Naval Hospital under the leadership of Hospital Manager E. V. Edwards, M.D. The original Long Beach Naval Hospital was built in 1943 and by 1950, it had a total of 1,600 beds - 459 of which were for tuberculosis, 337 for neuropsychiatry, and 764 for general medicine and surgery.

In 1958, a major new building was constructed containing 558 beds. Of these, 197 were reserved for patients possessing spinal cord injury, making the VA Long Beach facility the largest unit for treatment of spinal cord injuries in the world. A building housing 240 psychiatric patients was constructed in 1966, and the following year, the 11-story tower building that now predominates at the facility was created to accommodate 692 inpatients. The VA Long Beach hospital was, as the time, the largest hospital in the VA System.

A 170-bed nursing home care unit was constructed in 1975 to care for aging Veterans. The new Ambulatory Care Building, supporting the treatment of many more Veterans as outpatients, was opened in 1979. The Anaheim Veterans Outreach Center opened on October 31, 1980, to provide counseling services for Vietnam-era Veterans. A new 120-bed, $17.5 million Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) building was opened in 1988, providing state-of-the-art facilities for spinal cord-injured patients. This building was named after Chief, Spinal Cord Injury, Ernest Bors, M.D. who had been a VA Long Beach employee since 1950.