Category: Veterans’ Affairs Department

According to Fox News, Raymie Parker begged the staff at the Talihina, Oklahoma VA hospital facility to change his father’s bandages. By the time the staff got around to changing 73-year-old Owen Reese Peterson’s bandages and dressing his wound, it had become infested with maggots.

Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs executive director Myles Deering said the maggots were discovered while the patient was alive at the facility in Talihina, about 130 miles southeast of Tulsa. Deering said the maggots were not the cause of his death.

Deering said the veteran came to the center with an infection and died of sepsis, the Tulsa World reported.

According to Tulsa World, a physician’s assistant and three nurses, including the director of nursing, resigned in the wake of the investigation.

“All four chose to resign before the termination process began,” Faulkner said.

The VA’s excuse for the incident is that their Oklahoma facility is a shithole and they can’t find good people to work for them. Well, I feel better now. Don’t you feel better, Owen Reese Peterson?

A dentist who worked for the Veterans’ Affairs Department in Tomah, Wisconsin, used unsanitary practices which COULD have resulted in the infecion of hundreds of veterans according to WEAU;

The Tomah VA says it’s in the process of notifying 592 veterans that they may be infected with Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, or HIV after they received care from one particular dental provider.

Acting Medical Center Director Victoria Brahm said the dentist was using his own equipment, then cleaning it and reusing it, which violates the VA’s regulations.

The Tomah VA says it uses sterile and disposable equipment.

The VA says he did this for one year, from October 2015 through October 2016.

It came to light when someone filling in for his assistant noticed what was going on and reported it.

That dentist has been removed from patient care and is now working in an administrative role.

Well, at least he isn’t on unemployment or something. That would be horrible. The VA says that they have called about 50 veterans directly and they’re mailing the others. I hope the assistant that didn’t report his practices is on the block, too.

Thanks to everyone who sent links to this story.

According to Fox News, Brian Smothers, who told Congress about the Veterans Affairs Department’s waiting lists for veterans awaiting treatments, has resigned because of retaliation from the agency.

Brian Smothers told The Associated Press Wednesday the VA had opened two separate inquiries into his actions and tried to get him to sign a statement saying he had broken VA rules. He said he refused.

Smothers also said the VA reassigned him to an office with no computer access, no significant duties and no social contact.

He called the VA’s actions punitive and his working conditions intolerable. He said he resigned as of Tuesday.

The VA claims, of course, that they don’t tolerate retaliation. They do, however, tolerate cheats, liars and thieves, among their employees so I’m thinking that it’s not exactly a broad-jump to get to retaliation.

The New York Times reports that Florida Representative Jeff Miller, the biggest critic of the Veterans’ Affairs Department, is being considered by the Trump Administration to be the Secretary of the agency.

“Instead of trying to sugarcoat the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs,” the statement [from Mr Miller] said, “[Trump] has a plan to fix them that includes common-sense solutions such as protections for V.A. whistle-blowers, accountability for bad employees and providing veterans with more health care options.”

In an interview on Friday with Fox News, Mr. Miller said the agency — the second largest in the federal government, with nearly 350,000 employees — was “mired in a bureaucracy that just doesn’t want to move in the right direction.” He added, “You can’t have a World Series-winning team if you are not willing to get rid of those who can’t or won’t play their positions.”

As broke dick as the VA seems to be, they need a real critic to fix them. Miller has been consistent in his opposition to their system of promoting and protecting the problem children in the upper echelons of the agency. One thing is for sure – they can’t get worse.

The Military Times reports that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has back-pedaled on plans to offer sex-change surgery to veterans. Their reasoning seems to be budgetary;

The move, first reported by Military.com, is a significant setback for LGBT advocates and raises questions on whether the surgeries will be offered anytime in coming years, given conservative control of the White House and Congress in 2017.

In a statement Monday, VA officials said they plan on continuing to offer assistance to transgender veterans by offering “hormone therapy, mental health care, preoperative evaluation” and other services.

But pursuing a rule change to allow the long-held ban on VA physicians offering the surgeries will be delayed until “when appropriated funding is available.”

How’s about first showing us how gender dysphoria is service-connected like the rest of the stuff that we ask to get done. I’m not going to dispute whether or not it’s even necessary, not until they can explain to me how it’s caused by military service. Basically, it’s elective surgery. Are they going to offer tummy tucks and nose jobs to the fat and ugly? Probably not.

Are they giving treatment to every member of the military for the things that are connected to their service….not yet. This should go to the very bottom of the “To do” list until they can satisfy their actual mandate to heal service-connected injuries.

According to the Salina Journal, a whistleblower who is also an employee of the Veterans’ Affairs Department has emailed personally identifiable information (PII) of veterans being treated in Colorado to himself, causing the VA to warn more than 2,100 veterans in Eastern Colorado and parts of Kansas that their PII may have been compromised;

An agency employee told The Associated Press that he is the person who emailed the information to himself, describing it as unauthorized wait lists used by VA health care facilities in Colorado. The employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation, said he wanted to document the lists because they could have been used to conceal lengthy delays in providing care.

In Wednesday’s warning to veterans, the VA said the potentially compromised information included veterans’ full names, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and medical diagnoses. The agency said the employee emailed it to himself in unencrypted form.

Enough blame for everyone here. The VA apparently hasn’t abandoned their secret wait lists and there’s at least one employee who thinks that storing PII outside a secure system is OK to prove his allegations.