Veterans Affairs secretary Robert Wilke says he’s taking the message he’s heard from rural and native America VA clinics back to Washington.
Wilke visited four clinics in five days.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem says she’s making sure Wilke will visit the Hot Springs VA facility at a later date.
Governor Kristi Noem has talked extensively about Hot Springs as a veterans town. Even during her time in congress.
She says the national historic landmark in Hot Springs could be much more than a hospital.
“It could be a mental health facility, it could be a PTSD specialty center that the Save the VA has a presentation they’d like to give to the secretary on some ideas on how it could be utilized to serve and be a facility of excellence within the VA systems,” Noem says. “That’s the opportunity I’m looking for is for the people in that community to really show the secretary the possibilities of what it could be in the future.”
The Hot Springs VA facility was under the threat of closure due to a VA restructuring of services. That idea was abandoned after pushback from the state’s congressional delegation and an administration change in 2017.
VA Secretary Robert Wilke says he will return to South Dakota and says he plans on visiting the Hot Springs facility. He says closing the Hot Springs facility is not something that’s in the cards for the VA.
“It’s not something that would even be legal even if we wanted to do it,” Wilke says. “I do want to see it, to see what is going on there and talk to the veterans—I talked to a few today—who get their care there and just walk the post, as we say in the military. And take cognizance of what’s going on there.”
Wilke says he’s focusing on providing rural VA health systems and tribal clinics with sufficient bandwidth and the private sector to provide telehealth across state lines, so patients can communicate with doctors in Minneapolis and Denver.