Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Clinic serves veterans, their families
They served in Iraq. They served in Afghanistan. They served by assisting earthquake and hurricane victims. America’s vets left their families at home and risked their lives to do their duty for the country.
Since January, when its Veterans Access Clinic opened, Nova Southeastern University has started to serve the veterans in return, helping to reintegrate them into normal lives as citizens.
Leonard Pounds, the vice president for clinical operations at NSU, said that there was no question in his mind that they could make the greatest difference with veterans in Broward County and beyond with the Veterans Access Clinic.
Part of his passion for helping meet the health needs for vets is based on the fact that Pounds is himself a veteran.
“I’m a second generation military brat,” he said. “My dad was in the Navy in Vietnam. I also joined the Navy in 2000, right before 9/11.” Pounds served almost four years of active duty.
“When I got out of the military, nobody told me any of the benefits that I was supposed to be given,” Pounds said. “I went to the Veterans Administration, and they asked me why I never signed up for the benefits. But I didn’t even know I was supposed to sign up.”
The clinic offers services to veterans’ families as well.
“Where I think we still have a burning need is for coverage of the family dependents,” Pounds said. “Think about the families back home who had no idea what we [veterans] were doing. Their mental health, their children’s health, is so important. If we can take the burden of health care of a vet’s child, their wife or their significant other, off of their plate, then they can take that energy and focus it somewhere else — like education retraining, re-assimilation to the civilian world.”
Innovative health care
Thanks to a $5 million appropriation from the state of Florida, NSU established the Veterans
Access Clinic in January, which provides veterans with integrated, interdisciplinary care.
“We offer everything from dentistry, to optometry, to our nation’s leading autism clinic, physical therapy, pharmacy, speech language pathology. Every ‘ology’ you can probably think of, we have here,” Pounds said.
“You can’t get surgery here, but almost everything else you can have done,” he said. “We even have the nation’s leading researcher in Gulf War Illness Syndrome. The state saw how much we offer, and I told them we can make a kind of one-stop investment to get this clinic off the ground.”
Pounds doesn’t want to duplicate what the Veterans Administration already does for vets, but he does see a huge need to get health care and other services for their families.
“A veteran can go to the VA and get care, but unless they’re 100% disabled, the family’s not being seen,” Pounds said.
That’s where NSU steps in. “This clinic is for all veterans, not just NSU people,” Pounds said. “If a veteran or their friend or family member needs something that we don’t provide, we’ve got a network that will find someone who does what you need. We may not be able to give them the financial help, but we’ll be able to find the financial assistance. If there’s somebody out to help, we’ll do that extra work to make sure we find it for them.”
One family’s struggle
Kelly Auguste, the wife of a veteran and mother of two, had struggled after her husband, Derek, left his military career. The lack of health care was one of her biggest nightmares.
“My husband served in the Army for 11 years. He deployed to Iraq and to Haiti after the earthquake. He was in Iraq from 2007 to 2008. But by the time we actually saw him after his role in the war, it was almost 22 months later,” she said. “When he left his tour in Iraq, he was able to get stationed in South Florida at Homestead.
“He did 11 years in the Army. When he got out in 2015, like most families, we weren’t prepared. We weren’t properly prepared, financially or emotionally,” she said.
“I think it’s something people don’t understand, that when you’re in the military, it’s pretty normalized. You know what you’re going through, and it’s just another day. His career, his job kept him very busy,” Auguste said. “So there’s not really any downtime to stop and think about what’s really going on, nor is it talked about. But eventually all of that would eventually catch up to him.”
Because of her husband’s health challenges, Auguste left her job as a teacher to help him full time.
“We went from a two-income household to just one, and a teacher salary at that. It was not exactly a good combination,” Auguste said. “We almost lost our home. Health care had to be cut.”
Auguste’s husband finally got 100% coverage for himself through the Miami VA system. But his health care woes were still not over.
“Many offices don’t accept the VA type of insurance,” she said. “To this day, I still battle with bills that should be covered. It’s a decision that you have to make, and you convince yourself that we’ll figure it out, that we’ll be OK.”
So while her husband got some coverage, the family still had to go without since they couldn’t afford it.
“Without health insurance, you pray that the kids don’t get sick, you pray that you don’t have to take them to a doctor — or God forbid, a hospital — for any reason. Because you know that trying to pay that off will be a drowning experience,” August said. “All the while, I still had to support my husband, who was suffering from PTSD.”
And her husband’s VA health coverage came with a caveat: It didn’t cover PTSD.
“My husband was told he didn’t have PTSD coverage, because he wasn’t directly shot at in the military. Just because you weren’t shot at directly doesn’t mean that you aren’t suffering from PTSD,” Auguste said.
While she doesn’t suffer from PTSD herself, there is plenty of anxiety that goes along with being a spouse of someone who does.
“There was so much anxiety that came along with making sure that my husband went to class, making sure that I sat there with him as he was completing his academic assignments, helping him stay focused, helping him muster the energy,” she said.
Auguste remembered her fear about whether her husband was going to make it. “There were times I would come home from work, and I honestly didn’t know whether or not I would find him there.”
Her husband, however, sought help even though he didn’t have coverage. “I have been very fortunate that he sought out help and that there were different organizations that encouraged him, motivated him, engaged his mind and got him back into the community through service work.”
Finding care at clinic
“For quite some time after my husband came back, I was asking about coverage for veterans’ families,” Auguste said. And late last year, someone from the VA let her know about NSU’s Veterans Access Clinic.
“I was ecstatic to find out about all of the services,” she said. “I mean, dental alone was something to jump out of your chair and shout to the moon about, especially with children.”
A one-stop shopping approach for vets is what NSU calls its “concierge” service.
“They really took the time to think about what the whole family would need, especially in that dental clinic. They actually allocated a private space,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow, my husband can be seen here, because he suffers from anxiety.’ To be able to be seen somewhere where they took the time to think about what that veteran needs is amazing.”
A sense of relief
Donovan Auguste, Kelly’s son, is happy that the family’s health care scenario is looking up. Especially considering that his father’s outlook had been looking dire for so long.
“When my dad left the military in 2015, there were a lot of changes to the way he was acting. He became jumpy, angry and very worried. I would hear yelling upstairs at home, like he wasn’t right. He was anxious, his mind was somewhere else,” Donovan recalled.
“When he was around people, I saw him shutting down. He would look at somebody and scan the area, because in the military, you have to do that and know who he could trust. He kept quiet,” he said.
“But now, after seeing the doctor, everything is very peaceful. He talks more. He’s more open to talking to other people. Now I can never keep him quiet. He keeps on talking to everybody, like he’s making up for lost time.”
Kelly Auguste can’t say enough good things about the clinic.
“This service is not being done anywhere else in the state of Florida for veterans, the way NSU is doing. It is something that I will continue to boast and spread the news about, because this is exceptional. I am beyond floored with the service. I thank all of them from the bottom of my heart for their time and their love for this community.”