{"id":52283,"date":"2014-06-26T06:27:04","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T10:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=52283"},"modified":"2014-06-25T16:32:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-25T20:32:45","slug":"and-in-the-va-news-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=52283","title":{"rendered":"And In the VA News Department . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>. . . here are three more items.\u00a0 And, unfortunately, they&#8217;re not &#8220;good news&#8221; stories.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/article\/20140625\/NEWS05\/306250081\/2-more-VA-officials-resign\">Two more senior VA officials have resigned<\/a>. The current VA Undersecretary for Health, Dr. Robert Jesse, and the VA General Counsel, Will Gunn, have resigned. This means that the VA Secretary, five of the VA\u2019s Assistant Secretaries, and 2 of the VA\u2019s Undersecretaries have resigned recently. It won\u2019t fix the problems in that agency \u2013 but maybe it\u2019s a start.<\/li>\n<li>I say maybe because the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/article\/20140623\/NEWS05\/306230042\">VA still seems to be in denial regarding the seriousness of its internal problems<\/a>. The Office of Special Counsel released a report two days ago that, in essence, says the VA still doesn\u2019t realize how serious its problems are. According to the OSC, VA senior leadership continues to use the \u201charmless error\u201d excuse in ways that defy logic and which ignore \u201cthe severity of systemic and longstanding problems.\u201d The OSC also indicated that it has \u201c50 pending disclosure cases alleging threats to VA patient health and safety, and another 60 cases of alleged retaliation against whistleblowers in the department.<\/li>\n<li>And, finally:\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/article\/20140624\/BENEFITS04\/306240062\">another whistleblower has come forward from the Phoenix VAMC<\/a>. Along with corroborating previous whistleblower reports, this individual alleges personal knowledge that at least 7 veterans died while awaiting care on the Phoenix VAMC\u2019s \u201csecret waiting list\u201d.\u00a0 She further alleges that there was a management-directed effort to hide excessive waiting times, as well as a concerted effort to manipulate records to cover up the fact that people had died while awaiting care.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019ve said it before, and I\u2019ll say it again: resources are NOT the underlying problem at the VA. Leadership and priorities are the problem, along with a poor organizational culture.<\/p>\n<p>The former can be fixed relatively easily. The latter, unfortunately, will IMO likely take at least a decade to change.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Hat tip to the <em>Army Times<\/em> for the above links.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>. . . here are three more items.\u00a0 And, unfortunately, they&#8217;re not &#8220;good news&#8221; stories. Two &hellip; <a title=\"And In the VA News Department . . .\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=52283\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">And In the VA News Department . . .<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veteran-health-care","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}