Part 2 of my report on a brand new tool just launched by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, aimed at helping veterans find access to care in a timely manner.
It took an hour for the folks at Veterans Affairs to go over this entire website, so I've broken up this story into several parts.
Click Here to get my story from last week, an introduction to the Access To Care site.
Or Click Here to go straight to the tool.
For this entry, I'm focusing on two key things, the first of which is how you find the average wait times for the closest Veterans Affairs facility to you.
In Palm Beach County, your choices are the VA Medical Center (full hospital) in West Palm Beach and VA clinics in Boca Raton and Delray Beach. If you don't mind driving to Broward or Martin counties, there is the VA clinic in Deerfield Beach and the Stuart VA clinic.
First step is to click on the blue box on the top left in the picture above "How quickly can my VA facility see me?"
That will bring you to a page that looks like this:
Step 2 is to click on the box on the left: "Access Times at Individual Facilities". That will take you to a map of the U.S., and if you click on Florida, it will show you every VA facility in the state. You can also simply type in "West Palm Beach, Fl" in the search box at the top of the page and it will show you just the facilities within a set number of miles, including all of the ones in Palm Beach County.
The default setting is to show you facilities offering Primary Care, but you can change it to look for those offering a select number of specialty forms of care, including Mental Health, Women's Health and Optometry.
You can also switch between looking as a New Patient or Returning Patient. The site will display the average wait times for each.
Notice (below) it shows "Wait Times for the month ending 02/28/17." That threw up a red flag for me, so I asked the Under Secretary for Health at Veterans Affairs, Dr. Poonam Alaigh and her explanation was:
"There's always going to be a one month lag, because we had to wait for the appointments to be completed. So the wait times is a look back in terms of how long it took to complete an appointment."
Bottom Line: As the site explains "actual wait times for each individual Veteran may be shorter or longer than the average wait time."
You can also check which facilities offer same-day services for both primary and mental health care.
Click on the box on the right and it will display those in a set area. In our area, those would be the clinics in Boca Raton, Delray Beach and the VA Medical Center in West Palm Beach.
We'll look at more features this week.
Photos: Dept. of Veterans Affairs