FORT MYERS, Fla. (WINK) \u2014 A group of local veterans and community leaders want to bring a full-service VA hospital to Cape Coral.<\/p>\n
Official records show more than 114,000 veterans live in Southwest Florida, but many struggle to find care in the region.<\/p>\n
The “Cape Coral VA Clinic Expansion to a Full-Service Hospital Committee” formed to find a solution.<\/p>\n
Their plan is to turn the existing Cape Coral VA clinic into a full-service hospital so veterans can receive care closer to home.<\/p>\n
“We need to make sure that our veterans, including myself, have a facility that they don’t have to drive two and a half hours one way in decent traffic to get inpatient services,” Committee Chairman Dr. Alan White said.<\/p>\n
The committee’s vision is to build a nine-story, 200-bed hospital at the existing Diplomat Parkway site.<\/p>\n
The total cost would be between $700 million and $1.1 billion.<\/p>\n
Dr. Alan White says congressional approval and funding are key to making it happen.<\/p>\n
“Congress needs to approve this. They need to approve it from a clinic to a hospital. We need legislation to do that and of course funding is going to be critical,” White said.<\/p>\n
The next steps include completing a market assessment and a feasibility study before the project moves into the planning phase.<\/p>\n
Committee leaders hope to have the new hospital built within five years.<\/p>\n
Dr. White also wants all veterans to know about the VA medical system, an online health care portal where veterans can apply for benefits, find local facilities and receive those benefits.<\/p>\n
For more information, click here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT MYERS, Fla. (WINK) \u2014 A group of local veterans and community leaders want to bring a full-service…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":404305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,28,897,1521],"class_list":["post-404304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-florida","tag-fort-myers","tag-southwest-florida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}