Acting Secretary

Dear Mr. Gibson

I am so pleased that you have accepted the position as acting secretary of the department of Veterans Affairs and are committed to correcting the VA’s lack of correct, dependable, and consistent methods to provide quality health care to our veterans.

The Department of Veteran Affairs has been receiving a lot of media attention as well as pressure from President Obama in regards to this very serious issue with failure to prevent a general cover-up of to the dangerous backlogs and waiting lists across the nation's largest hospital network. The Department of Veteran Affairs failure to provide correct, dependable, and consistent information measuring the extent to which: veterans are receiving reasonable access to mental health care across the country, ensuring all veterans enrolled in VA's health care system are receiving the care they need; and is VA capable of maintaining the staffing it needs to care for the amount of patients in need of quality care. The VA’s failure to realize how their sudden changes toward managed care is affecting the health status of veterans. The focus should not be ensuring or enabling the veterans to pick and choose their own doctors as much as it is should be on making sure there are an adequate amount of doctors ready, willing, and able to assist with all health care needs. Measuring their effect on service delivery, and how it changes the patients’ outcome has not been accurately determined. Other public and private health care providers have recognized the necessity, and the difficulty of creating such criteria of managing non-health care benefits programs. However, the Department of Veteran Affairs needs to overcome a variety of obstacles, but focusing on the veteran’s need of quality health care must and should be priority.

Problem

Hospitals in general seem to have a problem filtering emergency cases according the stress level the patient feels in their current situation, and what the hospital determines as an emergency. The main focus should be on the health care of all individuals in need instead of trying to determine what needs immediate attention verses what can wait. There are many prominent issues that the VA has failed to overcome besides the waiting list. Of course the waiting list has bought much attention to the hospital, and this should be more of an opportunity for the VA to take advantage of getting help instead of just illuminating an issues that has been in existence for more then 20 years. In lieu of the waiting list the VA system of operation has been broken, and the approaches that have been taken to fix it have not helped.

There have been many of reports that highlight areas of conflict within the system of operation for the VA. Inspector General reports dating as far back as April 2012 concluded that Veterans Affairs does not have a reliable or accurate method of determining whether they are providing veterans timely access to mental health care services. The following process that the veterans must go through in order to receive the services they are requesting is almost nearly impossible when dealing with the wait list and getting through each department for clearance to the next. The Department of Veteran Affairs policy requires that all first-time patients requesting mental health services receive an initial evaluation within 24 hours, and a comprehensive diagnostic appointment within two weeks. For years now, Veteran Affairs officials have claimed that 95 percent of its new patients were seen in that time frame. However, in 2013 Inspector General report called those calculations chaotic and inaccurate. According to the Inspector General researchers’ count, fewer than half of those patients were seen within the 14-day requirement. The average wait for a full evaluation among the rest was 50 days. This is completely unacceptable, and shows a lack of accountability this country holds to supporting our