OMAHA VA EXPLORES PARTNERSHIP FOR NEW CARE FACILITY, INCLUDING POSSIBLY UNMC'S NExT

OMAHA- It’s been less than a year since the Omaha VA opened a new outpatient care facility to serve the region’s veterans, built through a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership with Omaha philanthropists. Now the Omaha VA is exploring another public-private partnership to improve inpatient hospital and surgical facilities for veterans — with one possibility discussed being to include such a facility as part of the massive Project NExT on the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus.

To help lay the groundwork for a potential new inpatient facility, U.S. Rep. Don Bacon and U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer this week introduced legislation reauthorizing the CHIP-IN for Veterans Act, the 2016 federal law providing for public-private partnerships that made the Omaha outpatient care center possible.

The officials confirmed they also have spoken with UNMC Chancellor Dr. Jeffrey Gold about the possibility of including the inpatient facility within Project NExT — the planned multibillion-dollar teaching hospital on the UNMC campus that would have wings devoted to training health care workers to respond to national disasters. The VA said in a statement that the discussions to date have centered on learning more about Project NExT, its parameters and whether a VA facility could become part of it.

“At this point, the discussions have not gone beyond high-level strategic conversations,” the statement said.

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