The Times-Picayune: UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS Patient Courtyard: Courtyards will include wrought iron, brick, ferns, flowering vines and other items that reflect the unique character and distinct architecture that is native to New Orleans.
August 21, 2011 - As the University Medical Center governing board wrestles with the financing and scope of a planned state teaching hospital in Mid-City, federal authorities are quietly approaching the start of major construction for an adjacent Veterans Affairs Medical Center that will replace the downtown VA hospital that has been closed since Hurricane Katrina struck six years ago.
“We are ready and we will be open in 2014,” said Julie Catellier, director of the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System. The VA’s project executive, Mark Brideweser, said pilings should rise out of the ground sometime in late fall or early 2012.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, who visited the city last week, said, “We’ve needed this hospital long before now. … But this hospital will open, and it’s going to be a dandy. New Orleans and the state of Louisiana will be proud.”
The planned 200-bed complex will anchor a health system that has spread across south Louisiana since Katrina and now serves 40,000 veterans in seven clinics and a new ambulatory-care center on Poydras Street, with inpatient services provided by VA doctors in other Veterans Affairs hospitals and through a contract with Tulane Medical Center.
Restoring a home base for hospital care, long-term rehabilitation and research, Catellier said, is the key step in restoring a completely integrated health system for former military men and women across the Gulf Coast. The system’s enrollment goal by the hospital’s opening date is 70,000. read more>>>
No Sacrifice now a decade long added to the previous decades!!
Already known through decades of our brothers and sisters living those false patriotic? meme's and cheap phony symbols of!
Recovery funds, i.e. stimulus, played a big roll in finally bringing this much needed VA facility forward, still way more needed as the Country ignores it's Veterans after cheering on it's wars of choice.
They played a part in moving this along but also gave Gen Shinseki the ability to do other needed VA issues, like IT upgrades, National Cemeteries, Clinic and other Hospital upgrades and new etc., that should have been done starting decades back but couldn't because of the constant underfunding and obstruction, easier to blame an agency the Country is supposed to properly fund then for same to look in the mirror, all the 98% that don't serve it!
Much more needed not only to help the brothers of Vietnam and even Korea but Especially the brothers and sisters of these still ongoing quagmires, as well as the First Gulf War Vets, that have greatly damaged the Country and the National Security of!
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