New Perry VA clinic opens to serve more Middle Georgia veterans
Open Monday through Friday, veterans will be able to receive medical exams and counseling.
PERRY, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Middle Georgia military veterans have sacrificed so much for this country, and they are now receiving a well-deserved clinic for their services.
The new Perry VA clinic was designed to cater to the needs of our vets. Open Monday through Friday, veterans will be able to receive medical exams and counseling. Strategic planner Roger Richardson says the new facility will be more convenient for local veterans.
“Now we’re bringing more of the services locally to the veterans and reducing their wait times and reducing the travel times and the burdens that can cause to them,” he said. “I think it’s amazing that we are expanding these footprints, because it does, again, it brings things we went weren’t necessarily receiving previously in our other clinical footprints and expanding on our capability and what we can provide, and it just increases the quality of life for all the veterans in our community.”
Richardson says Houston County’s veterans were struggling to get to appointments.
“The significant part about this is, Houston County is the largest county of veterans for all of the Dublin healthcare system, and we’re responsible for 46 counties in the Middle Georgia area,” he said. “12,500-plus veterans reside just in Houston County alone. That 27-hundred square feet was not enough to support the 12,000 that we should be offering all these services to on a daily basis.”
He says the new clinic will offer two women’s health exam rooms.
“What they found is female veterans have specific needs, so what they have done is they have started incorporating specific exam rooms with exam tables, and they have attached bathrooms, because that’s a need when you’re doing female exams,” he said. “So that enhances our capability here as well, and we have providers here that specialize with women’s health that help them with that specific care that they receive here too, so that’s also an added benefit of being in this location.”
Acting assistance director of Dublin VA health care, Roderick McNeil, says a VA clinic in Perry was overdue.
“It’s so necessary to reach out to all the communities,” he said. “It’s not fair really to ask everybody to go to Dublin or go to Atlanta so we want to go out to the communities where they live. Hence is why we have this clinic here.”
The clinic will offer veterans services including medical assistance, mental health services and an on-site pharmacy. It will also provide transportation for vets and authorized caregivers to get to medical appointments.
The clinic is located at 1309 South Main Street in Perry.
