VA bosses in 7 states falsified vets’ wait times for care

NOTE:

• The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA or DVA) is a government-run military veteran benefit system with Cabinet-level status.
• VA employs nearly 345,000 people at hundreds of Veterans Affairs medical facilities, clinics, and benefits offices and is responsible for administering programs of veterans’ benefits for veterans, their families, and survivors.
• VA budget request for 2014 was $152.7 billion.
• An inspector general leads an organization charged with examining the actions of a government agency, military organization, or military contractor as a general auditor of their operations to ensure they are operating in compliance with generally established policies of the government, to audit the effectiveness of security procedures, or to discover the possibility of misconduct, waste, fraud, theft, or certain types of criminal activity by individuals or groups related to the agency’s operation, usually involving some misuse of the organization’s funds or credit. In the United States, there are numerous offices of inspector general at the federal, state, and local levels.

(from reports by Reuters and USA Today) – Supervisors instructed staff to falsify patient wait times at Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facilities in at least seven states to show they met performance measures, USA Today said on Thursday, citing reports by the agency’s inspector general.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been under scrutiny since 2014 when a cover-up of long waiting lists and shoddy medical care for veterans at a hospital in Phoenix embarrassed the Obama administration. (See “Background” below the questions.)

“The reports detail for the first time since the Phoenix VA wait-time scandal in 2014 how widespread scheduling manipulation was throughout the VA,” USA Today said.

It said the manipulations gave the false impression that wait times at facilities in Arkansas, California, Delaware, Illinois, New York, Texas and Vermont met agency targets.

The paper said its story was based on 70 reports released following a Freedom of Information Act* (FOIA) request from USA Today. About half of the 70 reports are from investigations that were completed more than a year ago. [*The FOIA is a law that gives you the right to access information from the federal government. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government. It allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the federal government.]

Investigations launched by the inspector general into more than 100 facilities after the Phoenix scandal found that manipulations had been going on in some cases for as long as a decade, USA Today said.

Asked by Reuters to comment on the report, the agency referred to a statement it had issued in February which said the inspector general had substantiated intentional misuse of scheduling systems in 18 reports. Twenty-nine employees were disciplined as a result, the statement added.

USA Today said according to agency data, more than 480,000 veterans were waiting more than 30 days for an appointment as of March 15.

“VA whistle-blowers say schedulers still are manipulating wait times,” it added.

[Shea Wilkes, co-director of a group of more than 40 whistle-blowers from Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facilities in more than a dozen states, said the group continues to hear about it from employees across the country who are scared to come forward.

“Until the VA decides it truly wants to change its corrupt and poor culture, those who work on the front lines and possess the true knowledge relating to the VA’s continued data manipulation will remain quiet and in hiding because of fear of workplace harassment and retaliation,” said Wilkes, a social worker at the VA Medical Center in Shreveport, La.

This is not the first time the VA has said it would fix problems with scheduling:

• When the inspector general found in 2005 that VA schedulers were improperly booking appointments — and wait lists were therefore underestimated by as many as 10,000 veterans — the agency initiated a “national education plan” to retrain schedulers and supervisors.
• In 2010, VA officials discovered schedulers were using “gaming strategies” to falsify wait times to meet agency performance targets, and they required all schedulers to undergo new training, once again.

In the newly released reports, investigators found schedulers were using the same strategies. Most commonly, schedulers would start the wait clock on the day of the appointment they were booking rather than when the veteran wanted to be seen. The system then showed there was no wait time even if the veteran had to wait weeks or months for an appointment.]