Representatives from the Department of Veterans Affairs met in Sterling Thursday afternoon at the Bearup residence as part of the Veterans Community Partnership.
Tom Bearup said there were a couple of topics that were spoken in depth about.
Bearup: “One o f the topics was travel, how do they get to the doctor, ya know they don’t have the money but its not connected so they don’t get reimbursement for that, so that was one of the topics, the other one naturally was PTSD, we had a doctor who was there who specialized in PTSD from the Veterans Administration and they were very anxious to work with everybody, they were reaching out to the community, this is a relatively new program and what they’re doing is reaching out to the community.”
He said that the meeting spurred another meeting scheduled for June 26.
Bearup: “The exciting thing is just communicating with each other, now we found out different things that are there already that some of these vets might be able to get.”
Bearup added that with communication they are looking at many different ways like using social media to carpool to Anchorage or other places for doctors appointments.
Bearup: “Here’s the problem, lets see how we can solve the problem, its thinking out of the box, the typical thing is well if it doesn’t happen this way then it can’t work. We’re saying wait a minute, somebody’s got to get this thing started, we said ok lets do this thing and see.”