Does Shinseki ouster solve the problem

Paul8591 · May 31, 2014

Long waited resignation of Shinkseki was announced on Friday. But the question stays there, does Shinseki ouster will solve the problem?

VA health system deals with increasing number of patients every year. The complaints are increasing from veterans, who is getting treatment at VA hospitals. The problem is not the funds, the VA hospitals are already getting lots of funds. The problem is with the allocation of the resources and its proper usage. The bureaucratic setup at the VA health administration needs to be fixed.
There is a lot of pressure on the next coming secretary of Veterans affairs and how s/he handle the problems in the VA health administration.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/u..._th_20140531&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=60830498

waltky · Jun 2, 2014

Having a different secretary is not going to be enough,...

How the VA fostered a culture of gaming the system
June 2, 2014 ~ About two years ago, Brian Turner took a job as a scheduling clerk at a Veterans Affairs health clinic in Austin, Texas. A few weeks later, he said, a supervisor came by to instruct him how to cook the books.

"The first time I heard it was actually at my desk. They said, 'You gotta zero out the date. The wait time has to be zeroed out,'" Turner recalled in a phone interview. He said "zeroing out" was a trick to fool the VA's own accountability system, which the bosses up in Washington used to monitor how long patients waited to see the doctor. This is how it worked: A patient asked for an appointment on a specific day. Turner found the next available time slot. But, often, it was many days later than the patient had wanted.

Would that later date work? If the patient said yes, Turner canceled the whole process and started over. This time, he typed in that the patient had wanted that later date all along. So now, the official wait time was ... a perfect zero days. It was a lie, of course. But it seemed to be a very important lie, one that the system depended on. "Two to three times a month, you would hear something about it," Turner said another reminder from supervisors to "zero out." "It wasn't a secret at all." But all this was apparently a secret to Secretary Eric Shinseki, perched 12 levels above Turner in the VA's towering bureaucracy. Somewhere underneath Shinseki among the undersecretaries and deputy undersecretaries and bosses and sub-bosses the fact that clerks were cheating the system was lost. On Friday, Shinseki resigned and was replaced by his deputy.

But his departure is unlikely to solve the VA's broader problem a bureaucracy that had been taught, over time, to hide its problems from Washington. Indeed, as President Barack Obama said, one of the agency's key failings was that bad news did not reach Shinseki's level at all. This is an ironic development: Until recently, the VA had been seen as a Washington success story. In the 1990s, reformers had cut back on its middle management and started using performance data so managers at the top could keep abreast of problems at the bottom.

Then that success began to unravel. As the VA's caseload increased during two wars, the agency grew thick around the middle again. And then, when the people at the bottom started sending in fiction, the people at the top took it as fact. "Shinseki goes up to Capitol Hill, and says, 'I didn't know anything.' I find it perfectly believable," said Paul Light, a professor at New York University who has studied the bureaucracy of the VA and others in Washington. "And that's a real problem." For decades, the VA was a byword for bureaucracy itself, seen as Washington's ultimate paper-pushing, mind-bending hierarchy. That reputation was rooted in the VA's history: It came about because the agency's first leader was an audacious crook.

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Cultural change critical to rescuing VA, experts say
June 1, 2014 The country's largest hospital system lost its top two leaders in two weeks, is under fire from powerful politicians and interest groups, and awaits an internal overhaul in the glare of an election-year political spotlight. And the man at the helm acting Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson just joined the department in February.

I don't envy him, Hershel Gober, who twice served as acting VA secretary during President Clinton's second term, told the Tribune-Review. He's going to have to spend about 20 hours a day there. There is so much he's got to read, so much he's got to understand, Gober said. As the Department of Veterans Affairs tries to find its way through one of the worst crises in its history, critics inside and outside say nothing less than a cultural change will rescue the embattled agency.

Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned on Friday, two weeks to the day after Undersecretary for Health Robert Petzel retired. Shinseki was forced out by the growing scandal of secret waiting lists at VA hospitals across the country, including one in Pittsburgh that included more than 600 veterans.

But other incidents have shaken the public's confidence in the federal government's second-largest department. At least six veterans died and 16 fell ill during an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in Pittsburgh from February 2011 to November 2012, to name just one. Having a different secretary is not going to be enough, said Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Scranton. There are probably others who have to be removed, and even when you remove them and make changes, the key is going to be the result. Can you reduce substantially the backlog? Can you restore confidence?

Changing the way the VA operates won't be easy, in part because of its size. Its 2,022-page budget lays out more than $150 billion in spending. Its workforce is about the size of Pittsburgh's population.

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waltky · Jun 4, 2014

Interim VA chief working to immediately eliminate long treatment delays nationwide...

Interim VA chief cites progress amid new details on secret wait lists
June 4, 2014 ~ Acting Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson said Wednesday his department has contacted all 1,700 veterans caught up in a hospital wait-list scandal in Phoenix and is working to immediately eliminate long treatment delays nationwide.

Gibson met with veteran groups and spoke publicly for the first time since taking over from retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, who resigned Friday over widespread scheduling abuses at VA hospitals and clinics that have been blamed for 40 veteran deaths in Arizona. But even as Gibson offered reassurances, new details emerged that VA health care facilities in the Midwest also kept 10 off-the-books waiting lists with two being acknowledged as a health threat to patients.

A VA inspector general report last week found the potentially dangerous patient scheduling abuses were systemic in the department but only listed specific problems at the Phoenix VA hospital, where patients were never added to official wait lists as a way to conceal treatment delays of up to several months. As the president has directed, we are moving immediately to get veterans off of wait lists and into clinics, and we are taking action to fix the systemic problems that allowed these unacceptable waits to occur, Gibson said during a White House event Wednesday.

Sloan Gibson, acting secretary of Veterans Affairs, speaks at the White House on June 4, 2014 before first lady Michelle Obama announced a nationwide challenge to local leaders to end veterans homelessness by the end of 2015.

Gibson described the VA efforts during a meeting earlier in the day with the American Legion, AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Vietnam Veterans of America. Some of the 1,700 veterans in the IG report declined to provide contact information or were duplicate entries. According to a VA release, Gibson told the groups that by Friday the VA had called the 1,586 veterans the IG found on off-the-books waiting lists kept by staff in Phoenix. VA identified that roughly 725 veterans of the 1,700 identified by the [inspector general] wanted care within 30 days, according to the department.

The initial IG report, part of a larger audit of the Phoenix deaths and the VAs nationwide health care system, found that staff used strategies to make it appear facilities were meeting a VA requirement that veterans receive care within 14 days of their requested schedule date. The wait times were used in employee performance evaluations and related to awards and pay bonuses. A full report is expected to be completed in August.

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AboveAlpha · Jun 4, 2014

waltky said: ↑

Interim VA chief working to immediately eliminate long treatment delays nationwide...

Interim VA chief cites progress amid new details on secret wait lists
June 4, 2014 ~ Acting Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson said Wednesday his department has contacted all 1,700 veterans caught up in a hospital wait-list scandal in Phoenix and is working to immediately eliminate long treatment delays nationwide.
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I am not Military.

But I work with them.

The facts are the VA has three issues.

#1. It has NEVER been properly funded.

#2. The way it is run does not work.

#3. Because of #1 and #2....a long time FAVORITISM issue has exists as an injured soldier with the right connections get's preferential treatment...not that the soldier doesn't deserve such treatment.

Simply removing the TOP...is not enough.

It has to be tore down and rebuilt.

AboveAlpha

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Does Shinseki ouster solve the problem

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