The face of socialized medicine: VA Medical Centers.
Veteran patients in imminent danger at VA hospital in D.C., investigation finds
WASHINGTON – Conditions are so dangerous at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, D.C., that the agency’s chief watchdog issued a rare preliminary report Wednesday to alert patients and other members of the public.
Lots of details here. USA Today reported:
The VA inspector general found that in recent weeks the operating room at the hospital ran out of vascular patches to seal blood vessels and ultrasound probes used to map blood flow.
The facility had to borrow bone material for knee replacement surgeries. And at one point, the hospital ran out of tubes needed for kidney dialysis, so staff had to go to a private-sector hospital and ask for some.
The hospital, which serves more than 98,000 veterans in the nation’s capital, lacks an effective inventory system, the inspector general determined, and senior VA leaders have known about the problem for months and haven’t fixed it. Investigators also inspected 25 sterile storage areas and found 18 were dirty.
USA Today also listed a few other points from the report:
• In February 2016, a tray used in repairing jaw fractures was removed from the hospital because of an outstanding invoice to a vendor.
• In April 2016, four prostate biopsies had to be canceled because there were no tools to extract the tissue sample.
• In June 2016, the hospital found one of its surgeons had used expired equipment during a procedure
• In March 2017, the facility found chemical strips used to verify equipment sterilization had expired a month earlier, so tests performed on nearly 400 items were not reliable
The inspector general rarely releases preliminary reports. But Inspector General Michael Missal found the hospital in such a horrible state that he had no other choice:
“Although our work is continuing, we believed it appropriate to publish this Interim Summary Report given the exigent nature of the issues we have preliminarily identified and the lack of confidence in VHA adequately and timely fixing the root causes of these issues,” VA Inspector General Michael Missal wrote.
Missal stated that the findings “placed patients at ‘unnecessary risk,’” but the office does not know yet if any of the practices harmed patients.
After Missal notified officials, the VA built “an incident command center on March 30,” which included “logistics specialists, technicians and managers to fix the problems. But Missal said the officials must do more:
Such actions, Missal said, are “short term and potentially insufficient to guarantee the implementation of an effective inventory management system and address the other issues identified.
“Further, shortages of medical equipment and supplies continued to occur…, confirming that problems persisted despite these measures,” he wrote.