Health care serves a population that is diverse. The diversity is brought about by characteristics like finances, demography, race, sexual orientation, health status, age, and mental status, functional, and developmental status among others. Part of the population shall have these characteristics at a high end, and therefore have the advantage while others shall have the inferior or minor measures of the characteristics and might be disadvantaged. Those with the minor share of the characteristics are the vulnerable population in healthcare. They may be part of a marginalized racial or ethnic community, very old or very young, mentally ill, terminally illness, very poor and unable to afford proper medical care services, have developmental dysfunctions, prisoners, part of the LGBTQI community among other disadvantage. The vulnerability comes in with increased chances of not accessing or receiving proper health care.
An example of a vulnerable population is the military veterans in the US. This population is inclusive of retired military personnel who served the government in various areas including in foreign countries. Most of these people are old as they have already reached the retirement age ( Cope, Elmont, &Ward, J., ,2017) . However, some may not be very old but might have got a condition in the line of duty for example there could be a veteran who lost a body tissue while in a battle and the situation made him or her unfit to continue working in the service. S/he may require treatment from a person with special skills at handling battlefield medical conditions (Arentsen, Roper, & Young, 2016). Due to the nature of the work, experiencing wars, deaths of people in the battlefield and also seeing their colleagues die could have a psychological impact on them and may therefore need mental health care (Arentsen, Roper, & Young, 2016) . Additionally, the veterans are no longer able to work and therefore may be financially incapacitated.
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In light of the vulnerability that the veterans face, the federal government has instituted a veteran health care program through the US Department of Veterans Affairs. The program seeks to ensure that veterans have their medical bills sorted as it entails a health policy that gets facilitated by the benefits gathered when the person was still in service (Arentsen, Roper, & Young, 2016) . Also, the government has identified over one thousand facilities for the veterans. These facilities have the capacity to provide health care services of varying complexity. The facilities easily identify with the susceptible medical conditions that the veterans often have including psychological treatment, specialized treatment for any ailments that come with exposure to war and even illnesses that are associated with the elderly.
The veteran health plan has been effective and has helped the veterans and their families in a big way. Most of the veterans are grateful for the program especially because of the financial and specialization agenda (Cope, Elmont, &Ward, 2017) . However, there is still more that needs to be done in the provision of health services to the veterans. For example, the medical facilities that offer specialized services to the veterans are not equally distributed across the US. A veteran could be forced to travel for long distances to get to the identified health facility.
To solve this problem, the government could increase accessibility to veteran health care by increasing the number of facilities and personnel who can handle them and distribute these and other resources across the whole nation. The government could plan to have every district in the entire country to have a facility that takes care of the veterans. By so doing, the accessibility to veteran healthcare could increase immensely.
References
Arentsen, T. J., Roper, B. L., & Young, J. C. (2016). Validity testing and neuropsychology practice in the VA healthcare system: Results from recent practitioner survey. The Clinical Neuropsychologist , 30 (4), 497-514.
Cope, M. R., Elmont, L. &Ward, C. J., (2017). Native American Vietnam-era Veterans’ Access to VA Healthcare: Vulnerability and Resilience in Two Montana Reservation Communities. Journal of community health , 42 (5), 887-893.
