VA hospitals, health centers report back
Earlier this month, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson ordered the more than 1,400 VA hospitals and other facilities to report back by March 14 on the conditions of their facilities. The order came in the wake of reporting in The Washington Post, starting in February, on horrendous conditions in some portions of Walter Reed Army Hospital. Walter Reed is run by the Department of Defense, not the VA, but Nicholson said he wanted to be proactive.
Well, on Wednesday, the VA released its findings. More than 1,000 problems were reported. That's roughly 1.4 per facility, a figure that probably is meaningless in that it doesn't distinguish between hospitals and clinics, between old facilities and new, and so forth.
Some of the problems were serious: infestations of vermin; bacteria from urine and/or feces; fixtures such as certain types of shower heads in mental-health facilities, including one in Fayetteville, that would make suicide easier. But the department found that 90 percent or more of the problems found were minor, were simply a matter of buildings outliving the codes under which they had been built, or represented long-term wear-and-tear issues rather than more serious problems or outright neglect.
(I visited the Greensboro Vet Center, a mental-health facility, this past week. I was there to conduct an interview for an upcoming story on post-traumatic stress disorder, not an inspection. But as I recall, the facilities appeared neat, clean and organized.)
The problems and conditions reported by the VA were, in turn, self-reported by the facilities, so it's not clear how reliable the numbers and characterizations are. But whether they're reliable or understated, I suspect that some serious problems are now getting attention they previously weren't getting.