NH VA Hospital Will Not Return to Full-Service

New Hampshire will remain one of the three states without a full-service veterans hospital. After being downgraded from a full-service facility in 2001, NH legislators from Republican Senator Sununu to Democratic Representative Carol Shea-Porter asked for it to be returned to a full-service facility.

The Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital of NH is located in Manchester. Since October, the facility and its four outreach clinics have seen over 22,000 veterans. The hospital says that it has expanded its outpatient services, will be adding more exam rooms, expanding services for female veteran’s, and has added new surgical procedures to its range of treatments this year.

Sen. Sununu invited VA Secretary James Peake to the facility to try and convince him that the facility needed to be upgraded. The Department of Veterans Affairs said that he did not see the facility being returned to full service.

Peake also stated that he was against giving veterans cards to allow them to receive treatment at non-VA facilities here in the state. Currently, the hospital does not provide such advanced services like radiation treatment for cancer patients. As a result, patients in need of such treatments are referred to out-of-state VA facilities or to the few local providers that the hospital partners with.

Setting up the Manchester facility to meet those needs in-house would require too much resources, the hospital’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Breuder said. "That's a lot of infrastructure to only manage about 10 patients a day," he stated.

In a statement Sen. Sununu said, "When Granite State veterans are forced to travel out of the state to receive medical care, it can be a hardship for them and their families.”

The other two states that do not have full-service VA hospitals are Hawaii and Alaska, but veterans are allowed to use hospitals at military bases in those states. New Hampshire has no such bases.