For severely injured troops recuperating in Augusta, the wheels of bureaucracy are about to get greased.

U.S. Veterans Affairs Department spokeswoman Jo Schuda confirmed that a federal recovery coordinator, Erin Jolly, will begin work in Augusta on Monday.

Thus far, the city had been passed over by the program, which grew out of recommendations from a presidential panel formed after revelations of neglect and bureaucratic entanglements for patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The Dole/Shalala report, delivered to President Bush in summer 2007, called for a corps of experts to coordinate medical care, rehabilitation, administrative paperwork and reintegration into society for severely injured service members.

Of all the military hospitals in the country, Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center is ranked among the top three for taking in the most medical evacuees from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The active-duty rehabilitation unit at Augusta's Charlie Norwood Veterans Affairs Medical Center handles troops with spinal cord injuries, amputated limbs, loss of vision, bone fractures and other catastrophic wounds.

Still, the VA dispatched the first dozen recovery coordinators elsewhere, including to Walter Reed; National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.; Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio; and Balboa Navy Medical Center in San Diego.

The VA told The Augusta Chronicle in July that it had no immediate plans to put a coordinator here, but said it and the Department of Defense were "carefully tracking workload, geographic distribution and complexity of severely injured service members" and might reconsider.

Ms. Schuda said Ms. Jolly is in orientation this week. She will be based at Eisenhower, but her caseload could include VA patients and outpatients, Federal Recovery Care Coordinator Program Executive Director Karen Guice said in a written statement.