Access to care at heart of meeting with VA Secretary Collins – Colorado Springs Gazette

Access to care at heart of meeting with VA Secretary Collins  Colorado Springs Gazette

U.S. VA Secretary Doug Collins joined dozens of community leaders and stakeholders for a roundtable meeting in Colorado Springs to address veteran-related concerns. They might not have gotten all the answers they sought, but on Thursday local veterans and those whose work supports them got the chance to pose questions to the man in charge. U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins joined Rep. Jeff Crank and dozens of community leaders and stakeholders for an afternoon roundtable meeting at Mt. Carmel Veterans Service Center in Colorado Springs to address veteran-related concerns. Much of the roughly hourlong question-and-answer session focused on veterans’ access to timely medical and mental health treatment through the VA.

The session included discussion of issues with VA Community Care, the program that allows veterans facing long drives or waits to be seen at a VA facility to access the services they need from a provider in their community. “We are struggling,” said roundtable attendee Ron Fitch, president of UCHealth Pikes Peak Regional Hospital and Grandview Hospital. While his experiences with the local VA as a veteran have been positive and his care delivered in a timely manner, as a hospital administrator at “probably the largest provider in the state for specialty care that gets referred to the community,” Fitch said he’s seen how things have gone deadly