Category: Walter Reed

According to the New York Times, compared to the civilian health care system, in the military system (not the VA) “scrutiny is sporadic and avoidable errors are chronic”.

The Times’s examination, based on Pentagon studies, court records, analyses of thousands of pages of data, and interviews with current and former military health officials and workers, indicates that the military lags behind many civilian hospital systems in protecting patients from harm. The reasons, military doctors and nurses said, are rooted in a compartmentalized system of leadership, a culture of interservice secrecy and an overall failure to make patient safety a top priority.

I’m just one guy, but I used the military health care system more often since I retired than did while I was on active duty and I haven’t seen any of this. I’ve had surgery at Walter Reed (both of them) and Fort Belvoir.

I’ve also been treated at local civilian hospitals, and I trust military doctors more than I trust civilian doctors. You know when the doctor tells me that I had a “suspected heart event” and he wants to do an angiogram, I get suspicious. I think he wanted to do a wallet-ectomy.

The doctors I’ve had who were in the Army are professional at the tops of their profession. They’ve always been straight with me and they’ve always had my health at the forefront of their treatment.

Of course, your experience may be different. But, I’m just saying that my experience with the military health care system doesn’t look anything like what the NY Times tries to make it look. Did I mention that my wife used to work at (old) Walter Reed for six years (during the Iraq War)? Her only complaints were about the administrative staff and not the medical staff.

Now, most of you know how much I love Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The medical staff are the best (and prettiest) you could ever want. But those admin pukes suck real ginormous ass. Here’s another example; The Warrior Cafe is a centrally located dining facility in the building where most of the wounded warriors are – makes sense, right? Well, Fox News reports that the Warrior Cafe stopped accepting meal cards;

The decision would mean wounded warriors who would normally have a government-funded meal just down the hall would have to walk, wheel or limp nearly a half-mile across the Walter Reed campus to the temporary “food trailer” for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

“I mean it’s called the Warrior Cafe, you would think it is for us,” said Sgt. Josh Wetzel, who lost both his legs when he stepped on a pressure plate IED outside Kandahar, Afghanistan in May 2013. He’s been recovering at Walter Reed since and has been a daily customer at the cafe.

The status of the military’s decision may be in flux.

After Fox News submitted multiple inquiries with senior military officials earlier this week, the Pentagon responded late Wednesday. Lt. Col. Catherine Wilkinson, a Pentagon spokesman, told Fox News that Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, has decided to reverse the changes.

But they haven’t yet, actually. And they shouldn’t have to be told by Fox News that it’s the wrong decision. Those staff pukes who don’t have to deal with the patients should know that their decisions have consequences outside the doors of their offices. Like I said, the doctors and nurses at Walter Reed are world-class professionals and the admin goofs are world-class assholes.

Thanks to Susan and Preston for the link.

As most of you know, I spent the last four days in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda and it was a great time, well, as great as it could be. For those of you who don’t know, my left foot quit working the way it’s supposed to almost two years ago. At first the doctors thought it was ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), but I’m still alive, so it’s not ALS in it’s traditional occurrence. And there’s no family history of it, although that isn’t much of an indicator.

So the doctors wanted to run a butt-load of tests and they invited me to spend the week with them so they could run them. Some of you might remember that I was very critical of the admin people at the old Walter Reed and I predicted that would change when they moved to Bethesda, and that prediction was borne out this week. The troops who end up there are finally being treated like they should have been all along.

Before I was admitted, the doctors laid out for me an elaborate scheme of the tests they hoped to accomplish. I figured, based on previous experience that I’d be laying around waiting for four days, but that wasn’t what happened – it four days of real medical investigation.

The room they put me in was one that would make many patients envious. A private room with private bath, room service meals, and the Red Cross came by constantly to make sure I was entertained.

The nurses were polite and helpful. The doctors were efficient and explained every step of the analysis. The enlisted folks were just as amiable and proficient. Even the people at the desks of the various clinics were polite, something I criticized the old Walter Reed for constantly. I felt that there was an actual team of medical professionals working towards finding a solution and treatment for my ailment.

I never had any complaints about my treatment by the doctors at Walter Reed, but now it seems like they’ve finally made all of the support people at the hospital as efficient and proficient at their respective jobs.

Yesterday, I gave a presentation of my condition to about twenty neurologists so they could all consult with each other and figure the problem out. Because with ALS, there are no tests for the disease, only the elimination of everything else. I haven’t heard anything back from them yet, but I’m confident that they’ll be able to arrive at a conclusion among all of those brilliant minds.

As you may know, Walter Reed was a casualty of the latest round of BRAC realignments of military facilities worldwide and the 102-year-old hospital and research center is being relocated to Bethesda to co-locate with the Naval Hospital while part of Walter reed will move to Fort Belvoir, VA. The Stars & Stripes/McClatchy says;

Over the last century, the famous and powerful have come to Walter Reed. It’s a tradition for presidents to visit wounded soldiers. Winston Churchill and other foreign heads of state were treated there. Presidents Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were patients, as were Gens. Douglas MacArthur and John Pershing.
Bob Hope was a regular visitor for four decades, and Oprah Winfrey dropped by recently.

The campus was also the site of a brief Civil War battle in 1864, and a marker lies where Confederate sharpshooters climbed a tulip tree and almost killed President Abraham Lincoln. Historians say the sharpshooters hit a surgeon next to Lincoln, prompting a Union officer _ as legend has it, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes _ to call Lincoln a “damned fool” and urge him to take cover.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been treated at Walter Reed.

Most of my major surgeries have happened in that building, my wife was a nurse there for more than five years, we’ve both had some great times with wounded warriors while Concrete Bob barbequed our meals.

I make my last visit tomorrow, for an appointment and to stand for the last time with my FReeper friends who’ve stood at the front gate welcoming home the wounded for more than six years.

Uncle Jimbo was there yesterday for the casing of the colors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually glad to see them move. The doctors and taechnicians are the best in the world. Like I tell them, they kept Strom Thurmond alive until he was a hundred and as soon as he moved back to South Carolina and away from Walter Reed’s doctors, he died. Coincidence? I think not.

The problem with Walter Reed has never been the level of medical care…it’s always been the administrative monkeys who were supposed to make life easier for patients and troops passing through, but always did their level best to make life harder for their clientele. Moving from North West DC to trendy Bethesda might have an influence on that aspect of the care for warriors.

For instance, my latest complaint has been about the pharmacy – it used to be to get your prescriptions filled, you took a number from a machine and sat down and waited for your number to be called. Simple, right? Last year or so, they changed it – three ladies, each with their own computer, stand between the patient and the number-dispensing machine.

After you show your ID card to each of the clerks, they look up your name on their computer and hand you back your ID card and the last lady tears your number from the machine and hands it to you. So what used to be accomplished by a machine has been made more intricate by adding three pinheads.

I think I wrote about the Walter Reed armed gate guards who had a shootout at the Main Gate over a woman a few years back.

Apparently there was a shake up at Walter Reed several months back when they started checking the qualifications of the administrative employees and found most to be vastly under-qualified for their jobs and since they couldn’t fire the federal employees, they had to make up monkey work jobs for them. The move will unburden the Army of the derelicts.

Anyway, i’ll have photos up tomorrow night of the Free Republic’s “Last Stand” at Walter Reed, and if I’m silent tomorrow, you know why.

I forgot to mention that Walter Reed was the place I met my crush girl, Tankerbabe/Parachutecutie.