Healthcare

Nation’s Largest VA Healthcare Clinic Struggles To Find Staff

A hospital room. (Screen Capture/PBS North Carolina Channel)

Over a year after opening, the nation’s largest Veteran Affairs outpatient healthcare clinic still struggles to find healthcare workers to fully staff its 470,000 square foot facility.

Located about an hour south of Washington D.C., the $300 million dollar Fredericksburg VA Health Care Center opened up in March 2025, but still has a staffing vacancy rate of nearly 40 percent, according to a report Thursday by CNN.

This means that more than 350 positions still have yet to be filled, despite the clinic undergoing a phased rolling opening, according to the outlet.

The facility had a significant amount of empty space and patients found difficulties getting appointments or being seen by a medical professional, even in urgent care situations, CNN reported citing anonymous sources.

VA press secretary Quinn Slaven said that the clinic has “met its hiring goals,” in a statement to the outlet.

“In less than two years since opening, the clinic has already completed more than 245,000 appointments and is ahead of schedule for enrolling new patients,” Slaven said.

VA hospitals and healthcare clinics across the nation are not a stranger to being short-staffed. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs has built 41 new facilities nationwide to expand veteran care, according to a Sept. 2 post by the department.

The Department of Veterans Affairs did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

For the 2026 fiscal year, 97 percent of VA facilities across the nation reported have had severe shortages for doctors and 86 percent had severe shortages for nursing positions, a Sept. 11 report from the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Veteran Affairs found.

The servicing challenges at the VA facilities comes during a shortage of overall physicians across the country.

The National Center for Health Workforce Analysis projected that the US will have a shortage of over 141,000 physicians by 2038 in a Dec. 2025 white paper analysis it conducted.