Hi. I was asked to turn a comment I wrote last night into a diary. So ... here goes.
I'm a US Air Force veteran. I enlisted straight out of high school. Jimmy Carter was the President. My DD214 reads "Honorable," of which I remain inordinately proud, lo these many years later. But I'm another sort of vet ... I've got a service connected disability. It isn't trivial, but it isn't life-threatening, for which I'm grateful. It does give me a chance to see some VA facilities, from time to time. So yesterday I went down to the big VA hospital in Big Spring, and I saw some changes.
There's this new guy in charge of the Veteran's Administration-- a General Shinseki. His handiwork's pretty hard to miss, based on my personal observations about 48 hours ago at the Big Spring VAMC (now known as the West Texas Veterans Care Center):
The waiting rooms have been brightened up -- and there's cushioned flooring instead of concrete.
The Texas State Veterans' Home has moved to new quarters north of town. This means that vets who will probably never leave the facility are no longer stuck on the 3d floor of a building from 1948, but now have access to windows, that look out on flowers and lawns and a fairly scenic aspect of Big Spring, instead of across I-20 East at the side of a Wal-Mart.
There are now three full-time and one circulating clerks in the business office area of the waiting center. There are SIX clinics, now, instead of two. At about 1:45, the waiting room has actual empty chairs in it. There aren't clots of people standing looking stressed in the aisles, and the pharmacy window no longer makes you think you're in an 1890s bank with an armed guard watching you (which is still the case with the Lubbock clinic, darn it).
The docs are as eclectic a mix as ever, but there aren't long dark corridors -- they've painted, put in new light fixtures, and the ventilation system works, now. (It used to be pretty iffy.)
You can now park within 100 feet of the Urgent Care entrance --- and it's no longer only reachable by a flight of 22 steps. There's a RAMP!!!!
There's a women's program -- not just a women's clinic. This is light-years better than it was in 1988 (when I went in for a biopsy, [results benign] and scared a couple of male nurses right out of the room because they were expecting my dad to be the patient, not me) -- LIGHT-YEARS better, and in 1988 the VAMC in Big Spring was on the FOREFRONT of taking care of women veterans.
I'll tell you what -- Gen. Shinseki may not be a hero to everybody, but I've seen the results of his work in that hospital, and he sure gets my respect.
Probably 80% of the outpatient folks I saw going thru the VAMC yesterday were between five and thirty years older than me (and I'm enough over 50 now to have to think about things I used to take for granted). I saw attendants coming up to the airlocks and bringing out wheelchair-bound veterans to air-conditioned buses to take them over to Scenic Mountain or back up to the State Home.
They've planted shade trees on the parking-lot medians. In this part of Texas, in the middle of summer, this is a safety measure, not just a comfort issue.
And there's construction going on at the VAMC -- this was unheard-of in the 1980s or 1990s. It's not "patch it up or block off that door" anymore. It's fix the problems or add space where needed.