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Help the VA Help You?

by Patrick G. Brady

To Those Who Served:

     We are at WAR and have a medical system in the Veterans Administration that is in crisis. Care is a disaster as it tries to put a patch on the dam holding back old problems, along with current problems, and make adjustments for perceived future problems. It is time to step back and look at what is working and what is not. All of our VA Medical Centers are affiliated with a University Medical School, which use us veterans to train their interns and residents.

In past years, some within the system had the foresight to set up accredited fellowship programs that granted physicians Board Certification in a particular specialty, such as cardiology, endocrinology, neurology, radiology, neuro-radiology and spinal cord injury and so on. It used to be that these physicians would have to commit to so many years of service within the VA to gain access to these programs but as years passed, these programs were slowly eliminated as not being cost effective.
What they failed to realize was that in doing away with these programs, they did away with a source of future specialists and thus put the load on the staff on hand.

Through attrition, we now find ourselves in the CRISIS we are in today.

  Nursing had similar programs with either a two-year nursing program at community colleges, four-year programs from the universities, or nurse assistant programs that were set up at the high school level which, upon completion, gave the individual a General Education Equivalency Degree — all at local VA facilities. This was seen by some as being too expensive and that is why we have staffing problems in some facilities today. We need to renegotiate our affiliations with the universities and create through Congressional incentives, if necessary, a return to these types of pro-grams for the facilities that do not have them.

The cost of it will be far less in lives lost due to poor care. Currently, good physicians are stressed to the limit. I stress the fact that these programs be accredited as this is the only way it would end up being an asset to the Veterans Hospital System. There is no reason why we should not have an accredited fellowship program in every Veterans Medical Facility in every specialty that the facility has.

I ask that you copy this and send it to your local Congressmen and Senators

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