Two systems, sixteen listed sites, fourteen of them here
Kansas is divided between two Department of Veterans Affairs health care systems. VA Eastern Kansas runs from Topeka and Leavenworth, and its locations page listed nine sites when it was last updated on December 16, 2025[3]. VA Wichita runs from the Robert J. Dole Department of Veterans Affairs Medical and Regional Office Center on East Kellogg Drive, and its page listed seven when it was last updated on November 12, 2025[4].
Sixteen entries, but not sixteen Kansas sites. Two of the eastern system’s clinics are across the state line, at 2303 Higgins Road in Platte City, Missouri and 4782 Sienna Drive in St. Joseph, Missouri, because a VA health care system serves a catchment and not a state[3]. Counting from the addresses rather than from the page leaves fourteen sites in Kansas on those two dates: three medical centers and eleven clinics.
Two of the names do not say where they are. The Captain Elwin Shopteese VA Clinic is at 9201 Parallel Parkway in Kansas City, Kansas[3], and the Sedgwick County VA Clinic is a second Wichita site, on South Glendale Street[4]. One town carries two entries of its own: Junction City appears twice, at 623 and 1169 Southwind Drive[3].
| Site | City |
|---|---|
| Colmery-O’Neil Veterans’ Administration Medical Center | Topeka |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center | Leavenworth |
| Captain Elwin Shopteese VA Clinic | Kansas City |
| Iola VA Clinic | Iola |
| Junction City VA Clinic | Junction City |
| Lieutenant General Richard J. Seitz Community-Based Outpatient Clinic | Junction City |
| Lawrence VA Clinic | Lawrence |
The Wichita half of the map
On that November 2025 date the Wichita system listed seven sites and all seven were in Kansas: the Dole medical center and the Sedgwick County clinic in Wichita, and one clinic each at Dodge City, Hays, Hutchinson, Parsons and Salina[4]. Six towns and cities in total, two of the seven sites sharing Wichita between them.
The population and the patient count are different numbers
VetPop2023 puts the number of veterans living in Kansas at about 181,000 as of September 30, 2023. The header of that table instructs its users to report its numbers to the nearest thousand, because the cells hold model estimates rather than a headcount, and this page follows that instruction[2]. The largest single Kansas age band in the model is 75 to 79, at about 21,000 veterans.
The number the VA treated is far smaller. In fiscal year 2023 there were 60,137 unique patients in Kansas, in a workbook prepared in May 2024[1]. A footnote defines a unique patient as somebody who received treatment at a VA health care facility, with the data coming from the Allocation Resource Center. That is not a count of veterans enrolled in VA health care. A veteran who is enrolled and saw nobody that year is not in it, and the enrollment figure itself is published by neither of the two VA statistical files read for this page. The office that publishes VA data by state is the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics, and a Kansas enrollment count is its to release[1].
The same workbook carries its own Kansas veteran population column, at 182,119.75. That is not a second opinion on the 181,000 above. A footnote says the column is produced from VetPop2020, the earlier model, and dated September 30, 2023[1]. Two models, one date, a difference of roughly 850 people, and neither confirms the other.
Every county is in the file, and twelve towns have a site
All 105 Kansas counties appear in the same workbook[1], while the fourteen Kansas sites stood in twelve towns and cities on the two dates above[3][4]. The largest county counts for fiscal year 2023 were Sedgwick at 10,951, Johnson at 7,178, Shawnee at 5,403, Leavenworth at 4,289, Wyandotte at 2,656 and Geary at 2,385[1].
Two counties, Greeley and Stanton, carry an asterisk instead of a number. The workbook explains that an asterisk marks a value below ten, and that the next smallest value is suppressed as well so the hidden one cannot be worked back[1]. The 103 printed county counts add to 60,116 against a state total of 60,137, so those two counties hold 21 patients between them.
At the small end the printed counts run to two digits. Wichita County recorded 23 unique patients in fiscal year 2023, Hamilton County 26 and Haskell County 28[1]. Wichita County is not the city of Wichita, which is in Sedgwick County at the top of the same column. A Kansas table sorted by name gives a reader no hint at all that one name here is doing two jobs.
What the VA spent here, and where the workbook puts it
Kansas accounted for $2,369,198 thousand of total VA expenditure in fiscal year 2023, of which $1,063,829 thousand was medical care. The workbook states in its second row that its expenditure figures are in thousands of dollars, and a footnote says medical care expenditures are allocated to the patient’s home location rather than the site of care[1]. So the Kansas total is what was spent on people who live here rather than what was spent inside Kansas buildings.
One column in the same workbook is not distributed geographically at all. A footnote says every loan guaranty payment is attributed to Travis County, Texas, where the payments are processed, which is why that column reads zero for Kansas and for every state in the file but two[1]. It is a useful reminder that a zero in a geographic file can mean the money went somewhere else or that the file never tried to place it.
Community care is six doors, and only one of them is a drive time
When the VA cannot provide care itself, a veteran may be able to receive it from a community provider at VA expense. The regulation governing eligibility is 38 CFR 17.4010, in the title 38 edition revised as of July 1, 2025, and it sets out six conditions at paragraphs (a)(1) through (a)(6). No VA facility offers the care. The VA runs no full-service medical facility in the state where the veteran lives. The veteran holds a grandfathered eligibility from the 2014 Act, which the regulation limits to residents of Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming or to a narrow transitional group. The VA cannot meet the designated access standards. The veteran and the referring clinician determine that community care is in the veteran’s best medical interest, weighing distance, frequency, continuity and the burden of traveling. Or the VA has found under a separate section that one of its own service lines is not meeting its quality standards[5].
Only the fourth of those is the drive time rule. Under 38 CFR 17.4040, in the same July 1, 2025 edition, the designated access standards for primary care, mental health care and non-institutional extended care are an average driving time of 30 minutes from the veteran’s residence and an appointment within 20 days of the request. For specialty care they are 60 minutes and 28 days. Either wait can run longer if the veteran agrees to a later date in consultation with the VA provider, and the regulation says the driving time is calculated with geographic information system software rather than from a map or a questionnaire[6].
How often that standard is actually missed in Kansas, and how many referrals follow, is recorded in the VA’s own administrative data rather than in either of the directories used on this page.
The same measurement, taken for everybody else
The access standards in that regulation give this section a distance yardstick that comes out of a rule rather than a survey[6]. The rural care section measures the same kind of distance for emergency departments, by a different method and from a different source, and this publication's front page carries both.