BELINDA HILL – U.S. ARMY
Retired DAV national service officer Belinda Hill spent 30 years in the Army. When she retired from the service in 2009, she began to use VA services in New Orleans, Louisiana.
“We didn’t have a VA hospital, we had a VA clinic,” she said. “We now have a hospital, and there’s a big difference.”
Hill said while she was a patient at the clinic, they would give her a new primary care doctor every six months. She said she never felt comfortable because every time she’d go see the doctor, it was like starting over with her care. However, she said the VA hospital has given her the positive experience she’d originally expected.
“It’s very patient friendly,” said Hill. “When you walk in, there’s always someone with a friendly face helping you find where to go.”
Even though Hill said she gets most of her care through the VA hospital in New Orleans, it doesn’t seem like they considered the needs of women veterans when they built the new facility.
“They need to look more into the needs of women veterans and the specific things women need,” she said. “They send us out [to community care] to deal with a lot of female issues, and that’s a bad thing.”