VA conceals shoddy care and health workers' mistakes
Source: USA Today
VA conceals shoddy care and health workers' mistakes
Donovan Slack and Michael Sallah, USA TODAY Published 6:58 a.m. ET Oct. 11, 2017 | Updated 9:01 a.m. ET Oct. 11, 2017
....
A USA TODAY investigation found the VA the nations largest employer of health care workers has for years concealed mistakes and misdeeds by staff members entrusted with the care of veterans.
In some cases, agency managers do not report troubled practitioners to the National Practitioner Data Bank, making it easier for them to keep working with patients elsewhere. The agency also failed to ensure VA hospitals reported disciplined providers to state licensing boards.
In other cases, veterans hospitals signed secret settlement deals with dozens of doctors, nurses and health care workers that included promises to conceal serious mistakes from inappropriate relationships and breakdowns in supervision to dangerous medical errors even after forcing them out of the VA.
USA TODAY reviewed hundreds of confidential VA records, including about 230 secret settlement deals never before seen by the public. The records from 2014 and 2015 offer a narrow window into a secretive, long-standing government practice that allows the VA to cut short employees challenges to discipline. ... Some employees who received the settlements were whistle-blowers or appear to have been wronged by the agency. In other cases, it's clear the employees were the problem.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/11/va-conceals-shoddy-care-and-health-workers-mistakes/739852001/
Retweeted by David Fahrenthold: https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold
#BREAKING The VA has obscured misdeeds by staff members for years, a USA TODAY Investigation finds
Link to tweet
Plucketeer
(12,882 posts)wanted this agency sanitized - it could be done in a year. The key word is "wanted". Sure, it sounds great - Hail our valiant veterans! But when the investigative cameras go away.... ppfffffffftt! I'm 72 and had an appeal in for a year and a half now. An appeal on a malady that the VA initially volunteered that was likely a result of me being stationed at TWO different bases where Agent Orange was being used. Not a peep from the VA other than to say that such things can take as much as THREE years to get an answer for.
WHERE is that appeal of mine buried - and WHY does it take three years to get to the top of the stack? I sure don't envision President Looneybin rectifying the problems with the VA. He's focused on giving my monthly pittance to his high-roller cronies.
Bayard
(21,805 posts)My dad was a WWII veteran. He had been on high blood pressure meds for years, which worked very well for him. My brother and I finally convinced him that, yes indeed, he was eligible for VA benefits that would cost him nothing. The VA doctor switched him to meds that were, "almost as good" as the ones he'd been on, and much cheaper for them. He had a stroke that paralyzed the entire right side of his body a month later.
Of course, my brother and I have lived with the guilt of that ever since.
Duppers
(28,094 posts)Would be substandard. Nor that possibly... just possibly he would not have had the stroke on his original meds.
I'm so sorry.
bitterross
(4,066 posts)See, the VA can apparently do as well as private enterprise!