They deserve better

Discovery another black mark on VA care

As we get older, trips to the doctor’s office get harder to classify as just “routine.” Kids’ visits are, largely, about their growth and development, vaccinations and pro-active measures to give them the best opportunity to grow into adulthood without problems. And, of course, those unplanned visits for ligaments or bones damaged on playgrounds and ball fields.

At a certain age — we’re not brave enough to peg when that is — the focus shifts to aches and pains unfelt before, or to bodily functions that aren’t quite handling the day-to-day wear and tear we put our bodies through. We observe, too, that we’ve come to know more friends and family who have gone through heart attacks or learned to live with diabetes or are battling that awful attacker known as cancer.

Those latter experiences make us wary, worried that our own physician will one day utter the words that, at least before any reflection, sound like he’s just informed us what we’re going to die from. It’s certainly not always the case, with the advances of medical treatments and pharmaceuticals that can heal or at least mitigate what ails us.

When it’s good news, it brings a sigh of relief. Only the most paranoid person would think “But did they do the right test? Did the technician read the X-ray right? Were those my results or did they mix them up with someone else’s?”

Who thinks like that?

In the case of medical care at the Veterans Administration hospital in Fayetteville, it tragically appears asking just those sorts of questions would have been appropriate, even life saving.

A week ago, officials with the Veterans Health Care System of the Ozarks announced a shocking discovery: One of its pathologists had been “impaired” as he worked to diagnose patients’ medical conditions. The most horrible part was the discovery, in a review of 900 cases, that at least one death had resulted from a missed diagnosis involving the pathologist’s work.

An actual death.

At a facility designed to take extra special care of our nation’s veterans.

“We are treating this like a national disaster,” Kelvin L. Parks, interim medical director at the hospital.

And why not? Back when there was the big flap about veterans hospital waiting times, this hospital got good marks. But now we’re talking about the people who were supposed to treat a veteran and have instead been at the root of his demise? That qualifies as a disaster.

The pathologist worked at the VA hospital from 2005 to April of this year. Until 2016, he apparently worked without problems, but was suspended in March 2016 for working while impaired. He went through a recovery program and was monitored and some of his work checked. According to hospital officials, he was discovered impaired again in October. A check of 900 cases found seven missed diagnoses, one of them involving a death.

The pathologist, unidentified publicly by hospital officials, was fired in April.

So why are we just now hearing of this? Apparently, the hospital has held the information close to its chest throughout. They briefed the state’s congressional delegation just a few days before the public announcement, which was held at the insistence of U.S. Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers, who represents the district the VA hospital is in, according to other delegation members.

We appreciate the federal lawmakers for recognizing the matter needed to be widely revealed. Letters are going out to 19,794 veterans or family members whose cases were handled by the pathologist. All his cases will be reviewed in a massive undertaking dating back to 2005.

That it took so long after the second discovery for those affected to hear of this lacks the sense of urgency medical professionals should show with a discovery of potential missed diagnoses affecting people’s lives.

Sadly, this is another hit on the trustworthiness of a medical system this nation has created for its veterans. We suspect few, if anyone, involved in this would dispute this point: Our veterans deserved, and deserve, better than this … what’s the word … yes, disaster.