VA-DOD joint clinic opens in Marina

“Ha, it’s the best thing ever happened. I’m going home and cry tonight,” said Army veteran Hazel Tompkins.

For Tompkins, those will be happy tears. She said she has been advocating for veteran services for years.

The Major General William H. Gourley VA-DOD Outpatient Clinic is on the old military base Fort Ord in Marina. It will be treating retired and active duty members.

“It’s about one-stop shop. In other words, I think one of the biggest services we provide our veterans is combining metal health and primary care,” said Mary Roberts, medical director at the clinic. “So we treat the veteran as a whole person.”

“The more accommodations you can give to the veterans at a facility like this will be a lot better than having to send them to Palo Alto, because you have to fight the traffic and that’s brutal at times,” said Army veteran Kenneth Gilbert.

But that doesn’t mean people can totally skip the trip up North.

“It is too much to bring everything here. And in Palo Alto, we partner with Stanford, so there are some very unique care that goes on in Palo Alto that we cannot offer here,” Roberts said.

People will have to travel for services like advanced ear, nose and throat care and major surgical procedures. But many said it’s still a good start.

And this was also a big step forward for Fort Ord’s redevelopment because that hasn’t been easy.

“When you close a military installation, you’ve closed something that’s been used for military purposes for a long time. In the case of Fort Ord, for over 80 years. This was an installation that provided for training for the soldiers. That meant we had explosives, we had munitions. And we built this property in a way that serves the military, not the municipal needs,” said Michael Houlemard, with Fort Ord Reuse Authority.

With the debut of the new clinic, a part of the old military base is getting a new lease to serve those in service.

“It’s nice to see that we are finally being taken care of in a manner that I feel is, I will say it again, it should be a model for the entire nation,” said Navy veteran David Halstead.

The clinic will officially open to patients August 14. It will be open five days a week and once it reaches 10,000 patients, it’ll also open on Saturdays.