Adult daycare for veterans and more community services — as well as admitting more nursing home patients — are on the to-do list for the Florida Department of Veterans' Affairs (FDVA), according to a report a Senate committee heard Wednesday.
Wednesday's meeting of the Senate Committee on Military and Veterans Affairs, Space and Domestic Security started with the Chairman, Republican Sen. Tom Wright, saying he hoped to get to more of the "space" the committee is charged with overseeing.
But the earthly issues of an aging veteran population and expanding care to more veterans consumed the committee's inaugural meeting of the 2023-24 legislative term, as the FDVA's presentation took up the bulk of the committee's hour Wednesday.
Democratic Sen. Jason Pizzo, whose district straddles Broward and Miami-Dade counties, asked about the waiting list to get a nursing home bed at the state's veterans nursing homes.
Most of those on the waiting list to get in these homes could be accommodated if the FDVA was able to fully staff its nursing home facilities, according to Bob Asztalos, Deputy Executive Director of the FDVA, who addressed the committee. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, just 60% of the beds were filled because of staffing shortages. Now, these homes are about 80% full.
"Basically, we were almost half-empty," Asztalos said, thanking the committee for the $5.6 million that was appropriated to make the nursing homes' wages more competitive. "We're hoping that we're going to get our buildings back to full by the end of this fiscal year."
Two new nursing home facilities are becoming operational now, and two others are expected to be added in the next five to seven years. But the Department is hoping to expand its care to more than long-term facility capacity, Asztalos said.
"If a veteran fractures a hip, they need 10 to 20 days of rehab, right?" Aztalos said. "If they want to do it (rehab) in a veterans' home, they have to go up to Tampa or over Alligator Alley to Miami."
Asztalos gave the committee a breakdown of who Florida's veterans are. Florida has the largest population of women veterans — many of them needing places to live that can accommodate children. Categorizing the state's veterans by war, the state has just about 24,000 World War II veterans, 93,000 Korean War veterans and nearly a half a million Vietnam War veterans.
"In the state of Florida, we have almost three quarters of a million veterans who are aged 65 and over and 384,000 of them are service-connected disabled veterans," he said. "This is why we need our state veterans nursing homes. This is why we are traditionally full and need to continue building them."
About 205,000 Floridians are veterans of the Gulf War and about a quarter million veterans are from what Asztalos called the "Afghan-Iraqi" war.
"They want the community-based services," he said.
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