HAMILTON — In 2022, then-U.S. Senator Jon Tester's office announced that Hamilton's Veteran's Affairs Clinic would be getting upgrades.
Fast forward to 2025. Friday marked the grand opening of the new almost 8,000-square-foot facility.
"Health care should be accessible. It wasn't very accessible for a lot of our veterans," Army veteran and Hamilton VA Clinic nurse Heidi Duerr told MTN. "Our old clinic being that small, you could not get wheelchairs into half of the rooms."
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The Hamilton VA clinic just got bigger; in fact, the new building on North 1st Street is 600% bigger than the old facility.
"The older clinic was 1,200 square feet. This one's 7,200," Montana VA Health Care System Executive Director Duane Gill said.
The new grand clinic had a special grand opening, where a 101-year-old veteran cut the ribbon.
Jeanne Doyle who served in World War II as a U.S. Army nurse saw firsthand the shape some veterans returned from the war in and the care they needed to recover.
"You feel really bad for them because they've lost legs and lungs. It's that hard. They needed help both mentally and physically," Doyle shared.
Doyle believes the new clinic will have a major impact: "Oh, I think this will help, you know, anybody that really needs help."
Services will ramp up for veterans at the new Hamilton clinic.
"We'll have primary care, we'll have mental health services. We have laboratory, pharmacy, dietitian, social work, we will have physical therapy, two days a week, which is a new service here in this clinic that wasn't in the other clinic," Gill explained.
Veteran and current Florence VFW member Terry Wahl knows how crucial close-by quality care is.
"There's a lot of good veterans. There's a ton of them down here in the Bitterroot," Wahl noted.
With the facility being large enough to help Ravalli County's large veteran population, it'll be easier for people to stay local for appointments.
"I've taken people in Missoula in the past and we service other veterans and it's important that we're a little bit closer here," Wahl detailed.
Plus, making sure the people who've served our country feel supported is something many at the grand opening share.
"This is my dream job. I've always wanted to be a nurse and then help veterans," Duerr said.
"If we didn't have the veterans here, now we wouldn't be here," Doyle stated.
