Members of an informal watchdog group testified before a Senate committee this Tuesday, resulting in media blasting of the VA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) for failure to properly investigate claims concerning potential harm to veteran health.
The watchdog group, known as the Truth Tellers, is comprised of more than 40 whistleblowers from different VA facilities. It is headed by Shea Wilkes, a mental health social worker at the Shreveport, Louisiana VA location who discovered that veterans were waiting months, even years, for appointments. In 2013, Wilkes filed a report with the OIG alleging secret wait lists, and when nothing was done, he went to the media.
The result? The OIG opened a criminal investigation into how Wilkes obtained the list he used as evidence to show that patients were not receiving adequate care. (The criminal investigation was dropped just this last July).
The Truth Tellers’s testimony before the Senate painted a horrifying picture of retaliation against whistleblowers and inaction by the OIG. In particular, it alleged that if hospital leaders at the Tomah, Wisconsin VA hospital and the OIG had listened to whistleblowers, Marine Corps veteran Jason Simcakoski may have not been prescribed the lethal mixture of 13 different medications that killed him last year. (The OIG had completed an investigation of excessive opiate prescriptions at Tomah last year but closed the case without sharing findings with the public or Congress).
Sean Kirkpatrick, whose brother Christopher was a psychologist and whistleblower at the Tomah hospital, testified that his brother frequently told his family he was concerned about the overmedication of many of his veteran patients. Christopher Kirkpatrick killed himself in 2009. He had been fired after filing a complaint about narcotics abuse at the Tomah site.
The VA’s OIG’s office has responded to the panel testimony, but it has been a defense rather than a game plan. Claiming a lack of resources, Deputy Inspector General Linda Halliday acknowledged that the OIG investigates less than 10 percent of the nearly 40,000 complaints it receives annually about problems at the agency. “There is a serious discrepancy between the size of our workforce and the size of our workload,” Halliday said. She said her office has roughly 650 professional staff members while the agency they investigate has more than 350,000 employees and a budget greater than $160 billion. “The OIG is not right-sized to respond to all the complaints that we currently receive.”
That’s not something Halliday specifically can fix, but someone needs to. It’s like inviting a party of 50 over for dinner and saying well, sorry, I only have chairs and food for five of you and then staring at the guests until they leave. That’s not how you would hold a dinner party, and it’s certainly not how one of our most important federal departments should operate.
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Where is the Commander in Chief and CEO of the executive branch in regard to these significan issues?
Since when is it the OIG’s job to fix problems. It is to identify problems. The VA has a Secretary whose job it is to administer the department, including fixing identified problems. The article was a plea to expand the OIG to duplicate matters that belong to the Secretary.
It’s the OIG’s job to make sure the problems are properly investigated and routed. If a complaint is made and the OIG doesn’t have the means to investigate/refer it, that means the issue goes unaddressed. It’s a broken chain in the process to resolving these issues.
I personally know staff at the VA hospital in Portland who are so overworked that they constantly fulfill double shifts weekly. One of these nurses is a woman I used to date but she was so loaded with work that I finally just gave up. I agree that some veterans are over medicated but until the staff can control their clients depression or ptsd symptoms there is an urgency to calm them down. I, personally, am a sufferer of ptsd but chose not to use medication for years. I went into counseling for my problems and after 4 years went on a medicine that seems to work for me.
It takes time and counseling together to make things work out. The only remedy I see is to increase staff. Unfortunately the VA budget does not allow enough dollars for it. It’s a shame.