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Monday, March 05, 2007Most private hospitals can only dream of the futuristic medicine Dr. Divya Shroff practices today. Outside an elderly patient's room, the attending physician gathers her residents around a wireless laptop propped on a mobile cart. Shroff accesses the patient's entire medical history--a stack of paper in most private hospitals. And instead of trekking to the radiology lab to view the latest X-ray, she brings it up on her computer screen. While Shroff is visiting the patient, a resident types in a request for pain medication, then punches the SEND button. Seconds later, the printer in the hospital pharmacy spits out the order. The druggist stuffs a plastic bag of pills into what looks like a tiny space capsule, then shoots it up to the ward in a vacuum tube. By the time Shroff wheels away her computer, a nurse walks up with the drugs.... square with this: Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken. "It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again." Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. ? How did the VA system go from being the most vaunted, sterling example of how well government-run healthcare can work to being a decrepit not-fit-for-dogs system in just a few short months? It didn't. The Washington Post did an investigative piece on Walter Reed, but the complaints about the VA are from emails. Uncomfirmed emails. I haven't been inside a VA hospital for nearly twenty years, but I have patients who go there for routine care in order to get their medications inexpensively. I haven't heard one patient complain about the facilities or the staff. And believe me, they wouldn't be shy about it. Most of the horror stories in the Post article focus on hospitals at military bases, not the VA. The VA complaints are vague and focused on entitlements: Among the most aggrieved are veterans who have lived with the open secret of substandard, underfunded care in the 154 VA hospitals and hundreds of community health centers around the country. They vented their fury in thousands of e-mails and phone calls and in chat rooms. "I have been trying to get someone, ANYBODY, to look into my allegations" at the Dayton VA, pleaded Darrell Hampton. "I'm calling from Summerville, South Carolina, and I have a story to tell," began Horace Williams, 62. "I'm a Marine from the Vietnam era, and it took me 20 years to get the benefits I was entitled to." .....Sgt. William A. Jones had recently written to his Arizona senators complaining about abuse at the VA hospital in Phoenix. He had written to the president before that. "Not one person has taken the time to respond in any manner," Jones said in an e-mail. From Ray Oliva, the distraught 70-year-old vet from Kelseyville, Calif., came this: "I wrote a letter to Senators Feinstein and Boxer a few years ago asking why I had to wear Hospital gowns that had holes in them and torn and why some of the Vets had to ask for beds that had good mattress instead of broken and old. Wheel chairs old and tired and the list goes on and on. I never did get a response." Oliva lives in a house on a tranquil lake. His hearing is shot from working on fighter jets on the flight line. "Gun plumbers," as they called themselves, didn't get earplugs in the late 1950s, when Oliva served with the Air Force. His hands had been burned from touching the skin of the aircraft. All is minor compared with what he later saw at the VA hospital where he received care. "I sat with guys who'd served in 'Nam," Oliva said. "We had terrible problems with the VA. But we were all so powerless to do anything about them. Just like Walter Reed." It's not clear how long ago Mr. Oliva and the others had to wear torn gowns and use broken wheelchairs. Was this in today's VA or yesterday's VA? Shouldn't a distinguishd paper like the Washington Post investigate those allegations before publishing them? Why, they're acting like a blog! posted by Sydney on 3/05/2007 08:39:00 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:I haven't been in a VA hospital since my wife finished her internship, but that was only a couple of years ago. She always said that they had the best computer system of any hospital she has ever worked in, and probably still to this day. (dont get me as an IT guy started on the absolute silly exercise of developing a HUGE browser based app to have all your records in and then force it to run only inside of a Citrix session. Talk about overcomplicating for the sake of growing your IT department, but I digress...) But the rest is run like any other bureaucratic exercise. Which means that the hospitals, and even the individual wards on the floors run the gamut from the absolute best to what it might be like if the DMV ran health care.
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We need to be careful to differentitate between the Active Service Hospitals and the Veteran’s Administration. There are major differences.
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it's like the IHS (Indian Health service). The building is old and ugly, the beds etc old fashioned, but it treats poor people, and they are treated well because the doctors try their best.
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My father is a VA patient and is treated very well. If he waits more than 20 min. he has been told to speak to someone so that he will not wait any longer. This is compared to the hour plus wait my wife and I see when we go to a physician.
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I recently was treated for AIDS at the MPLS, VA, and have two tales:
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I recently was treated for AIDS at the MPLS, VA, and have two tales:
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