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The Las Cruces Mobile Vet Center is hosting the event to provide information about VA benefits and resources, including VA health care eligibility and enrollment, suicide prevention efforts, disability compensation, VA home loans, and HUD-VASH housing assistance.
The New Mexico Department of Veterans' Service will be able to help with VA benefit claims.
The Veterans Resource Pop-Up Event will be held at New Mexico State Veterans' Home, located at 992 S. Broadway St., from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
If you're a veteran in crisis or concerned about one, you can contact the Veterans Crisis Line to receive 24/7 confidential support. To reach responders, dial 988 then press 1, chat online at VeteransCrisisLine.net, or text 838255.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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It's just going to make it worse.' A new state-of-the-art health clinic in Fredericksburg, Virginia, lays bare some of those challenges. Opened to much fanfare in February this year, the more than 470,000- square- foot facility was billed as a 'significant milestone for VA to continue delivering world-class health care to our veterans in Spotsylvania County and beyond,' according to the VA news release. The center is intended to provide primary care, mental health, rehabilitation service and specialty care like cardiology, neurology and dermatology for some 35,000 veterans each year and to bring some 900 new jobs to the area. It was opened to relieve overcrowding at other VA hospitals in the region. When CNN spoke to two patients who had sought care at the facility in April, they said it felt clearly short-staffed. 'It was a ghost town,' said Lt. Col. Janice Sierra, who is retired from the US Army Reserve. Sierra and retired Navy veteran Van Elder told CNN at the time that the pharmacy was not open, X-rays were not available, and the women's clinic was not open. 'I'd call it pitiful,' Elder said. 'It was just a virtually empty place.' Asked about the staff shortage at the time, VA Secretary Collins said it was to be expected that the Fredericksburg clinic would not be fully-staffed initially, but that the agency would ramp up staffing. 'When you open new facilities, you open them in phases,' Collins told CNN's Jake Tapper in April. 'When false stories get out there that [these facilities] they're not opening fully staffed because of things that we've done, that's just a lie,' he said, adding that it would be 'fully equipped by the later this year, which is exactly the way it was supposed to open.' The pharmacy at Fredericksburg has recently opened. But as of late June, Elder said the radiology wing still had not opened. He said the staff recently told him he needed to go to the VA Medical Center in Richmond, an hour away. When he got there, Elder saw a sign in the radiology department saying: 'Notice: Severe Staffing Shortage; Wait times will be longer than anticipated.' Elder shared a photograph of the sign with CNN. The VA spokesman told CNN that the 'VA Fredericksburg Health Care Center's phased opening and staffing plan is right on schedule. The clinic started with approximately 230 team members, and it now employs 289 people, with another 266 in various stages of recruitment,' and that x-ray services would be open in late July. He attributed the lack of radiologists at the Richmond site to a national shortage, noting that radiologists are exempt from any hiring freeze. 'The Richmond VAMC is actively recruiting more radiologists, and because Richmond VAMC patients can access radiology services at VA or in the community when needed, there have been no delays or negative impacts to patient care,' Kasperowicz, the VA spokesman, said. In this climate, medical professionals who spoke to CNN said an added dose of stress has been a lack of support staff such as supply clerks and administrators. They say this has forced frontline medical workers to take on these tasks themselves — with limited success. The ordering of supplies and equipment came to a halt, said the doctor at the central US VA hospital, while a doctor at another VA hospital said physicians and nurses there are now servicing medical equipment and making patient appointments. 'This is like a death by a thousand cuts,' that doctor said. 'They're trying to make life difficult. They're trying to make people quit.' The senior VA doctor from the southern US hospital told CNN that they were preparing rooms before their appointments. 'I change the paper on exam tables. All the doctors do,' the person said. Westmoreland, the longtime nurse in Augusta, told CNN that shortages are so bad at her hospital they are even low on portable jugs to collect urine from bed-bound patients, forcing nurses to have to 'call around from unit to unit to unit to try to find a urinal [jug].' Even when one is found, there is no one to bring them up. 'The supply area's locked up because they don't have enough staff,' said Westmoreland, who CNN met at a rally for veterans and union members in Washington, DC. 'And it's very disheartening to the nurses because I'm trying to take care of my patients, and I'm having to run around and find something that I should have in the cabinet,' she said. 'Who's on the other side of that shortage?' she said. 'A veteran who stood on the line for us, for our country, and he deserves better care than that.' Kasperowicz told CNN nurses at the hospital 'have access' to the urinals when they need them and a person who has keys is available to unlock the supply closet. He added that 'there is no scenario in which VA will require doctors to perform anything other than their normal patient care duties.' Regardless of whether or when more layoffs happen, doctors who spoke to CNN agreed that they are concerned that patient care will worsen. 'I'm going to fail,' one doctor said, 'because I can't do budgeting, hiring actions, scheduling actions' on top of treating patients.
