Veterans Outpatient Facility Unveiled

As a few hundred veterans and their families looked on, officials at the Sepulveda VA Medical Center unveiled the facility’s new ambulatory care facility and touted the center as an example of the future of medical care.

The new 242,000-square-foot center replaces the old hospital facility that was destroyed in the Northridge earthquake. It took nearly two years and $47 million to create the three-story building atop a hill off Plummer Street, but staff members said it was worth the effort.

“It isn’t often in one’s life that one experiences something that may be deemed a disaster, [but] that becomes a fortuitous circumstance that propels a facility into a model of modern health care,” said Dollie G. Brown, associate director of the center.

Though the building was presented in a lavish ceremony Friday afternoon, staff members will not begin moving in until the beginning of next year.

Outpatient surgeries--the last service to be established--will begin around March 1997, said William Ball, public affairs officer.

Some people who attended the event complained that inpatient care was an important part of the facility and should have been retained. But Kenneth W. Kizer, undersecretary for health in the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the facility is a prototype for health care in the future.

“This sophisticated ambulatory care really exemplifies what is happening in health care,” Kizer said. The full-hospital system of health care is falling out of fashion, he said, in favor of outpatient care with a “less fragmented” way of treating the sick.

“The future of health care lies . . . in managing the entire process to put the patient at the center of the health care universe,” Kizer said.

The Sepulveda medical center will continue to offer long-term nursing care and will refer patients who need to be hospitalized to the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center or to another local hospital in an emergency, Ball said.