Veterans Affairs General Surgery

The Palo Alto Veterans Health Care System is a Dean’s affiliated hospital of Stanford University and serves the veteran population in VISN 21 (Hawaii, Northern California, and Nevada) as well as taking complex surgical care cases as referrals from VAs around the nation. Our immediate catchment area extends from Yosemite, the central valley, east bay, peninsula, south bay, and south coast past Salinas. We are the designated complex care facility for referrals from VISN 21. We are proud to serve our veteran patients and fulfill the promise made by President Lincoln in his second inaugural address “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.” VA care has been shown to be a leader in US medicine in outcomes, minimization of racial disparities in care, and complex care of the veteran patients who often have other comorbities compared to the general population.

Our service provides state of the art open, laparoscopic, and robotic treatment of typical surgical conditions such as hernia, soft tissue masses, endocrine, gallbladder, colon and rectal surgery. We have two recognized areas of special emphasis-complex gastrointestinal cancer care including stomach, liver, pancreas, intestine, sarcoma, melanoma, and colorectal tumors. The VA has been an ACS Commission of Cancer Certified Caner program for more than 20 years. In addition, we are a national referral center for bariatric surgery which features a recognized multidisciplinary approach to the complex patient with morbid obesity.

Our faculty are all board-certified Stanford faculty members with additional training in liver/pancreas/gallbaldder, minimally invasive surgery, bariatrics, robotics, endocrine, hernia, sarcoma, and colorectal surgery. We are a training site of the Stanford medical school and Department of Surgery. Patients are focused to a surgical specialist who is an expert in their specific disease area.