Difficulty recruiting medical professionals and the forecasted impacts of the Trump administration's healthcare funding cuts have led Augusta Medical Group to close three facilities. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Augusta Medical Group is the network of primary care and urgent care clinics in the Augusta Health system. The organization announced last week that it will be closing three locations in response to both existing pressures and the anticipated impacts of Medicaid cuts and other changes in federal funding.
Buena Vista Primary Care stopped seeing patients on Monday. They're being transferred to the health system's Maury River and Lexington practices. Churchville Primary Care will move all of their patients to the Verona practice in October. And the Weyers Cave Urgent Care has been functionally closed since May –
CECELIA CARPENTER: Because we haven't had providers to staff it.
Cecelia Carpenter is the chief operating officer of Augusta Medical Group.
CARPENTER: Nationally, and in the state of Virginia, there is a shortage of physicians and advanced practice providers. … This also can be a difficult place to recruit folks to, if they don't necessarily have ties to the community. … But the other piece of it is, we're really looking ahead, monitoring the impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and understanding that we're going to have to provide healthcare differently in the future than we have in the past. … These three locations all have populations that are either decreasing or fairly stagnant and are not projected to grow, and they also have fairly small populations.
The health system has begun deploying its new mobile clinic to Weyers Cave.
CARPENTER: Augusta Health remains committed to taking care of our community. That's our mission. That's always going to be our mission, and we're just evaluating how we can … achieve that mission in different ways.
Carpenter said all staff at the three closing clinics are being reassigned to other locations within the health system.
Full disclosure: Augusta Health underwrites programming on WMRA.
