The Central Oregon Vet Center, which specializes in mental health counseling for combat veterans, in Bend has a new team leader who plans to increase outreach activity in Central Oregon.

The regional vet center has been understaffed since last summer, when two of its three counselors left in a short period of time. Counselors from Portland have been traveling to Bend to provide coverage of group therapy, but U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials acknowledged that the local center has been doing less one-on-one counseling because of the turnover.

The new team leader is Amanda Juza, an Army veteran who did two tours in Iraq. Juza, who has a master’s degree in social work, is one of the stand-in counselors from Portland. The VA is in the process of hiring a third counselor to completely staff the center, she said.

Juza was chosen because she has a track record in community outreach, said Steve Reeves, a vet center regional manager based in Fairfield, California. “She’s set up a lot of community access points in southern Washington,” he said. “She has a wealth of experience in more rural areas.”

Vet centers operate separately from VA hospitals and full-service clinics. They are meant to offer unlimited services to combat veterans and sexual-assault victims from any era.

The Central Oregon Vet Center serves an area stretching north to Warm Springs and east to the Idaho border. Ideally, all vet centers will work with veteran-serving organizations throughout the region to make counseling services available closer to veterans’ homes, Reeves said.

Juza, who accepted the job last week, said it’s too soon to talk about specific outreach plans.

“I’m excited about the opportunity, and I really look forward to getting to know the community and being part of it,” she said. “Hopefully the community will expect really great things from us in the future.”

Bend is one of the newer locations in the VA’s system of vet centers. In the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Central Oregon Vet Center saw about 330 patients with 3,394 visits, Reeves said. Past years’ data were not available, but Reeves said that under normal staffing conditions the vet center would have had around 4,000 visits.

—Reporter: 541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com