Healthcare

Nation’s Largest VA Healthcare Clinic Struggles To Find Staff

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

The Department of Veterans Affairs pushed back on CNN’s report that its largest 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 — meaning more than 350 positions still have yet to be filled, according to a Thursday CNN report. However, a VA spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the clinic is “opening in phases” and “met its hiring goals in the first three phases and is now in Phase 4.”

“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,” the spokesperson told the DCNF in a statement. “All eligible Veterans have the choice to get care at the Fredericksburg VA clinic other nearby VA locations or dozens of nearby community providers and urgent care locations at VA expense.”

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.

The VA spokesperson told the DCNF that CNN alleged it had interviewed multiple veterans who said they were turned down for urgent care due to a lack of health care personnel at the Fredericksburg clinic and were told to seek care elsewhere.

However the VA spokesperson told the DCNF that the department “repeatedly asked CNN for evidence backing up these claims, but CNN could not provide it.”

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.

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 U.S. will have a shortage of over 141,000 physicians by 2038 in a Dec. 2025 white paper analysis it conducted.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the VA’s comment about CNN’s report.