(I feel bad about dinging the VA one more time here, but the reality is, until it's up to where it needs to be, it's nothing personal. Really. Just vision for the future, and how it could be.)
One of the true, unreserved joys of blogging about a topic like this is the camaraderie that develops among the other bloggers with a heart for the same topic (Ilona Meagher, Kathie Costos, and Jim Tabb, not to mention the IAVA blog, I'm talking about you :-). The other day I posted an item about how PTSD payments vary hugely from state to state, and fairly arbitrarily as well; something I'd seen a brief mention of in an IAVA blog post. Jim Tabb liked what I wrote, touched on the same topic himself, and then dug a little deeper, to find some backstory, which he blogged about yesterday, here. Now I'm picking up the same baton and saying, "Thanks, Jim" -- what he wrote about the other day is worth reading as well. What he found was an article from about six months ago saying, shock of shocks (tongue firmly planted in cheek), that the VA has a bad habit of overestimating what a great job it's doing with its patients. In other words, even in the absence of the actual facilities to treat them, it's got a pretty rosy picture of how things are going. Here's the original article -- from way before James Peake, M.D. was confirmed as the new head of the VA -- and it's entitled, to the point, "VA Medical System Isn't as Big a Success As Officials Have Asserted."
The article was originally published in the Columbus, Ohio Ledger-Enquirer, one of the McClatchy newspapers. (McClatchy did some great independent research behind the article mentioned earlier, exposing the wide and illogical disparity in VA benefits for PTSD.) Here's just a sampling of what they found:
Consider how returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder - a major ailment to emerge from the war in Iraq _ are cared for. The VA's top health official, Dr. Michael Kussman, was asked in March about the agency's resources for PTSD. He said the VA had boosted PTSD treatment teams in its facilities.
"There are over 200 of them," he told a congressional subcommittee. He indicated that they were in all of the agency's roughly 155 hospitals.
When McClatchy asked for more detail, the VA said that about 40 hospitals didn't have the specialized units known as "PTSD clinical teams." Committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate and experts within the VA have encouraged the agency to put those teams into every hospital.
Even considering that other PTSD programs are available, there are about 30 hospitals with neither PTSD teams nor any other kind of specialized PTSD programs, although all hospitals have at least one person who specializes in the ailment, VA records show.
Thanks, Jim, for bringing this to our collective attention. A great news item like this can really get lost in the shuffle, unless we know to look for it.
And in case we really need to spell it out why news like this is significant, it's because...well, you can't exactly fix or improve a system -- which most would argue badly needs improvement -- unless and until you recognize that there's a problem. Everyone who's been in business ought to recognize the scenario here. Life presents many opportunities to either dig in and deal with what's going wrong, or focus on the surfacey, soft sell and spin. When it comes to care for veterans, there's no question what they deserve and what we want to see. That's the point, in total.
