Fort Belvoir Community Hospital - Fort Belvoir Community Hospital

Fort Belvoir Community Hospital is a military treatment facility operated by the Department of Defense. Located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, south of Washington D.C., the hospital is part of an integrated health care system under the National Capital Region Medical Directorate (NCR MD) (formerly Joint Task Force National Capital Region Medical (JTF CapMed)) providing health care to members of the United States Armed Forces and their families.

The $1.03 billion, 1.3 million-square-foot facility replaced DeWitt Army Community Hospital located on Fort Belvoir and integrated various aspects of the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., officially in August 2011 in accordance with 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Law.

History

The former DeWitt Army Community Hospital at Fort Belvoir, Va., for which Fort Belvoir Community Hospital replaced, was named in honor of Brigadier General Wallace DeWitt, Sr., (1878â€"1949), a surgeon who served in World War I and World War II.

The DeWitt Army Community Hospital opened in 1957, having cost $4.5 million to construct. It was the second of nine hospitals planned by the Army during the building program following the Korean War. DeWitt was a 46-bed Joint Commission-accredited facility and the only military inpatient facility in Northern Virginia. It was the center of the DeWitt Health Care Network, which featured the Andrew Rader Army Health Clinic at Fort Myer, Fort A.P. Hill, and the Family Health Centers of Woodbridge and Fairfax in Virginia.

As part of a Base Realignment and Closure announcement on May 13, 2005, the Department of Defense proposed closing Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) and merging it with the National Naval Medical Center located in Bethesda, MD, and DeWitt Army Community Hospital. Moving nearly half of Walter Reed’s services to DeWitt would greatly expand the hospital’s mission. In November 2007, ground was broken on Fort Belvoir’s South Post golf course for the new Fort Belvoir Community Hospital.

As part of the effort to transform service specific medical facilities into joint service facilities, Fort Belvoir Community Hospital’s staff includes Army, Navy, and Air Force medical personnel, making it one of the first joint medical facilities within the Department of Defense.

Structure

The modern, 120-bed facility was designed by HDR, Inc. and incorporates natural elements and themes. Fort Belvoir’s new hospital has a seven-story main structure, flanked on each side by two outpatient clinic areas providing both primary and specialty care. In total, it consists of five total buildings, 3500 parking spaces, 44 clinics, expanded pharmacy services, 430 exam rooms, 10 operating rooms, two DaVinci surgical systems, two linear accelerator cancer/oncology systems, and one of the military’s only dedicated substance abuse programs.

Inpatient services were tripled in volume over the old hospital, and the expanded outpatient specialty care center offers services as a more local and convenient alternative than Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which is located over 30 miles away on congested highways. The hospital incorporates evidence-based design principles in its treatment approach.

Visits/Capacity

Department of Defense officials project the eligible beneficiary population will increase to more than 220,000 with approximately 40 percent of the expanded health care system enrolled population consisting of retirees and their family members. The anticipated outpatient workload is expected to grow to more than 600,000 visits per year in primary, specialty and ancillary clinics.

Selected specialty clinics such as Cardiology, Medical Oncology, Pulmonary, Radiation Oncology and Urology alone will generate approximately 54,000 appointments per year. The hospital’s Labor and Delivery service delivered 104 babies in its first month of operations.

References

 This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Government document "Fort Belvoir Community Hospital".

• "Medical care expands under BRAC". 2007-04-05. Retrieved 2007-04-26. 

External links

• Fort Belvoir Community Hospital
• Fort Belvoir Community Hospital on Facebook
• Fort Belvoir Community Hospital on Flickr
• Fort Belvoir Community Hospital on Twitter