Temporary VA Clinic to Open in Lewisburg | Charleston Gazette-Mail

Greenbrier County will once again have a Veterans Administration health clinic after environmental problems closed the county’s lone clinic for most of the last 18 months.

The new, temporary clinic will be in Lewisburg and will be up and running by the end of December, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced Tuesday.

The clinic will be located at the Rhema Christian Center, at 3584 Davis Stuart Road in Lewisburg, and will remain open until a permanent clinic is established, Manchin’s office said.

Southeastern West Virginia has largely been without a clinic since June 2014, when the clinic in Maxwelton was closed for air quality problems. Employees had complained of dizziness, headaches and feeling ill and tests later found elevated levels of formaldehyde in the air. The clinic opened and closed at least three times over the course of the last 18 months as it struggled with air quality and temperature problems.

While it was closed, patients of the Maxwelton outpatient clinic were relocated to the Beckley VA Medical Center.

West Virginia has four main VA hospitals — in Beckley, Clarksburg, Huntington and Martinsburg. Clinics, like the one in Maxwelton and the new temporary one in Lewisburg, operate under the supervision of one of the four hospitals.

The Maxwelton clinic served about 2,400 veterans in Greenbrier, Monroe, Pocahontas and Summers counties in West Virginia and Alleghany County, Virginia.

In September, Manchin and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., held a town hall in Maxwelton with VA Secretary Robert McDonald to discuss the shuttered clinic.

“I am so pleased to finally announce that our veterans will once again have access to the medical care and services they need at this mobile clinic while we finalize plans for a permanent clinic,” Manchin said Tuesday, in a prepared statement.

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