Ongoing concerns about our VA health care system and a recent Access Audit by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have left policymakers, veterans and the general public searching for answers on how to provide the men and women who have served our nation with the health care they earned and deserve. While Congress has acted quickly in approving a number of short-term fixes for our most pressing concerns, and the VA has committed itself to more systemic changes for the long term, I believe that we can and must look to our own backyard to find additional solutions that will work for us.

In Hawaii, the VA Access Audit revealed serious and unacceptable delays in bringing new enrollees into the system, with average waits of 145 days to see a primary care physician. It is clear that the VA simply lacks the resources to address the growing backlog, which will continue to increase as the men and women of our armed services return home from Afghanistan and the services draw down on end strength.

Hawaii faces additional challenges because it often provides veterans services to the entire Pacific Area of Responsibility. With large veteran populations in Guam, the Philippines, American Samoa and elsewhere in the Pacific, Hawaii’s already crowded system becomes even more overpopulated. It also presents additional problems in serving an extensive geographic area.

We can immediately address many of these challenges with a ready solution found at the U.S. Naval Hospital Guam.

Under a 2006 agreement with Japan, 8,600 Marines and 9,000 dependents were to be transferred from the island of Okinawa almost 1,500 miles south to Guam. Since the initial plan, the agreement has been reworked to send almost half of the original transfers elsewhere, including 2,700 to Hawaii.

The new hospital in Guam was planned to accommodate this growth in population. However, because the size of the transfer has been scaled back, it will likely leave the facility with excess capacity. We should use this capacity to alleviate the lack of care for the Pacific’s veterans by using a model similar to Tripler Army Medical Center, that is, to co-locate a full-service veteran’s clinic at the new facility in Guam.

In addition to better balancing the VA’s workload across the Pacific, a Guam clinic would reduce the cost of flying veterans from remote areas, which places a heavy burden on a system already lacking resources.Both flight time and costs could be reduced, while providing a local solution for these deserving veterans. Hawaii could focus on serving its own veteran population, which continues to grow and where more veterans have served since 2001 than any other state in the country.

Together with Hawaii’s Leeward Outpatient Healthcare Access Center, which was funded in recent House and Senate measures, a Guam VA clinic can play a central role in addressing core concerns with Hawaii’s VA system: reducing wait times and providing veterans across the Pacific with timely, effective health care services.