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REPORT: VA SIGNIFICANTLY OVERSTATES ITS SUCCESS
IN DEALING WITH WAITING LISTS -- VA claims 95%
of
appointments are scheduled within 30 days of
request.
VA's IG says that number is closer to 75%.
The VA keeps playing the waiting list game!
This is not new news...it's been going on for
years.
Last year I wrote a piece about the waiting
lists...the politics...and the sometimes deadly results. That
article here...
http://vawatchdog.org/milcom/didth
evareallyeliminatewaitinglists.htm
Now, the VA's IG is preparing a new report on
this healthcare fiasco.
Story here...
http://www.realcities.com/
mld/krwashington/17355113.htm
Story below:
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Report: Veterans Affairs significantly
overstates its success over 'appointments'
By Chris Adams
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Department of Veterans Affairs continues to
significantly overstate its success in getting patients to see doctors
for timely appointments, undercutting one of its key claims of success,
according to a draft report obtained by McClatchy Newspapers.
While top VA officials told Congress earlier this year that 95 percent
of appointments are scheduled within 30 days of a patient's requested
date, the true number is about 75 percent, according to the analysis by
the department's inspector general.
The report hasn't been released and is stamped "Draft - For Discussion
Only." It's in the final stages of preparation and could be revised.
In a statement, VA spokesman Matt Smith said the department was
reviewing the report and remains "committed to ensuring our veterans are
seen in a timely manner." The VA said it will visit facilities in need
of improvement and will hire a contractor to review the department's
scheduling procedures.
Some medical centers performed far worse than average. In Columbia,
S.C., and Chillicothe, Ohio, only 64 percent of VA appointments were
within 30 days of a patient's request, the report said. The high score
among centers studied was Detroit at 84 percent.
The inspector general's report is an update of a similar report from
2005. It's based on an analysis of 700 medical appointments and 300
referrals at 10 VA medical centers, as well as interviews with 113 VA
schedulers.
Waiting times for veterans to get in to see doctors are closely watched
by Congress and veterans' advocates. In February, the VA's top health
official, Michael Kussman, told a congressional committee that the VA
provides 39 million appointments a year - and 95 percent of them are
done within 30 days of the patient's request.
"We want to make it 100 percent," he said. "We are going to work hard to
do that. But all told, I think we are providing pretty good service for
people when they need it."
In its annual report, the VA broke those numbers down further, saying
that 96 percent of primary-care appointments were within 30 days, as
were 95 percent of specialty-care appointments.
The inspector general's assessment was far different.
Looking at appointments that the VA said took place within 30 days, the
inspector general found that only 78 percent of primary-care
appointments and only 73 percent of specialist visits were within 30
days.
As it did in 2005, the inspector general found that VA schedulers
weren't following department procedures when making appointments.
The VA calculates waiting time as the difference between the appointment
date and the patient's "desired date." But the report said schedulers
often mistakenly recorded the first available appointment as the desired
date, thus understating waiting time.
In another type of error, the inspector general found that at one
hospital, a veteran was referred for a specialty appointment in April
2006. On Sept. 20, the scheduler set an appointment for Oct. 20 - 185
days after the requested date of April 18. But the scheduler recorded
Sept. 20 as the desired date, which gave a reported waiting time of 30
days.
Schedulers used the wrong desired dates 72 percent of the time for the
bulk of visits analyzed, according to the report.
Beyond that, schedulers failed to follow VA rules and keep up-to-date
waiting lists for patients needing appointments. Such electronic waiting
lists are "instrumental in making sure no veterans go untreated," but
none of the 10 medical centers investigators looked at properly
maintained the lists, the report said.
Another continuing problem: lack of proper training. Schedulers told the
inspector general that they didn't have time to take available training.
"Their managers agreed, saying that medical facilities were short of
staff and training was not a high priority," the report said.
In a May 18 meeting between VA officials and the inspector general's
office to discuss the findings, a deputy undersecretary for health,
William Feeley, said he was concerned about the inspector general's
conclusion that the VA "overstated" the number of veterans seen within
30 days.
According to an internal report summarizing the May 18 meeting, Feeley
said that "such a statement could easily be misconstrued by readers of
the report to imply that VA was being deliberately deceptive, when there
was no evidence to that effect," the report said. "He went on to say
that this is a situation where honest people are trying to do the right
thing, but that processes are breaking down."
Last month, McClatchy reported on the VA's tendency to exaggerate its
accomplishments; among the examples was that VA Secretary Jim Nicholson
told Congress about the VA's "exceptional performance" in getting
veterans in to see doctors.
The VA told McClatchy it had largely fixed its prior scheduling
problems, although this latest report shows that the department has yet
to make all the improvements it promised after the 2005 inspector
general's report.
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Larry Scott --
