By the numbers:
21 days: Average wait time for appointments at Springfield VA clinic
30 days: Goal wait time for appointments at national VA facilities
3,500: Local veterans and family members the Springfield VA clinic serves each year
$30,000: Money spent on new upgrades at Springfield VA clinic this year
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The Springfield satellite of the Dayton Veterans Affairs hospital has started a new program aimed at improving care by listening to veterans and their concerns.
The Springfield VA Community Based Outpatient Clinic, 512 S. Burnett Road, also will undergo more than $30,000 of renovations, including new flooring and paint. It hopes to expand to a new location in Clark County soon.
The clinic recently organized a group called the Unit Practice Council to connect local veterans to the inner-workings of their health care system, said Linda DeWitt, a registered nurse there who heads up the council.
This push to connect to veterans comes in the wake of news of long wait times and questions over quality of care at VA facilities across the country.
“Veterans really need to know what’s going on,” DeWitt said. “They need to be a part of their care, to feel that they’re not a number and that they are a person.”
The Dayton VA Medical Center operates four satellite clinics in Southwest Ohio, including the Springfield clinic that serves more than 3,500 veterans and their family members each year.
The leaders in Dayton started the council as part of an effort in the past year for relationship-based care, DeWitt said.
The veteran-centric approach to health care, including councils like the one started in Springfield, are being promoted throughout the Dayton VA network, DeWitt said.
Brad Oiler of Springfield served in the Army for 20 years — including five tours in Iraq — before a medical condition sidelined his career. He retired from the Army in 2011.
Oiler moved his family to Houston, Texas, at the beginning of this year and experienced the long wait-times that has plagued the VA system.
“It was rough to get in to see a doctor and I was out of my medications for about 45 days,” he said.
The veteran waited more than a month to see a doctor in Texas. He and his family then moved back to Ohio recently, Oiler said, in part because of the medical care they received at the Springfield center.
“I can come in here and see my doctor — sometimes the same day if it’s important enough — or I can get my medications within 24 hours,” he said.
All VA centers strive to see patients in less than 30 days, organizers said. The Springfield clinic has an average schedule time of 21 days, DeWitt said.
Oiler said he has never had to wait more than eight days to get in for an appointment.
The clinic hopes to also improve its wait times with the addition of two doctors in July after working with only two doctors in recent months.
The center offers a variety of different services from general care to podiatry to optometry and has a full-service pharmacy.
It’s been in the strip mall on South Burnett Road for almost two decades, but clinic leaders said they will soon seek a new facility to fit their growing numbers.
In the next 15 years the VA expects to see more than 25 percent more veterans than it does now.
The clinic will stay in the city limits of Springfield, DeWitt said, and will look to move to or build in an area that best fits the needs of the veterans they serve.
Clinic staff members have invited veterans they know to be part of the council but any veterans interested in joining the group can call the clinic at 937-328-3385.
Some local veterans are trying to spread the work about the VA medical services that are offered in their own backyard through the Springfield clinic. That includes Randy Ark, a Vietnam veteran from Clark County and a new member of the clinic’s council.
“A lot of veterans don’t know what they can take advantage of,” with the clinic here in Springfield, Ark said.
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