Paper finds that VA is slow to act on problem doctors»
Reporters at USA Today this week revealed yet another disturbing practice by the nation’s health care provider for veterans — sweeping bad doctors out the door but their misdeeds under the rug.
The USA Today investigation found the Department of Veterans Affairs “has for years concealed mistakes and misdeeds by staff members entrusted with the care of veterans.”
It’s unclear if the practice is still ongoing because the investigation relied on confidential documents acquired by the reporters from 2014 and 2015. But what is certain is that in that narrow window of time VA investigators found cause for termination in 126 cases, and 75 percent of those were settled with the VA agreeing “to purge negative records from personnel files or give neutral or positive references to prospective employers.”
Unsurprisingly, the VA declined to comment on the findings, noting they occurred under previous leadership.
According to the story, VA Secretary David Shulkin did change a policy in response to the investigation, requiring all settlements with employees involving more than $5,000 be approved by top VA officials. The new policy strikes us as falling woefully short of addressing the primary concern of the investigation: that bad VA doctors are being passed on to private practice and patients aren’t being notified quickly of mistakes that could have been made in their treatment.
Shulkin, picked for the post by President Donald Trump, needs to go further in his assurances to the public that the VA is doing or will do its small part to flag problem health care providers and disclose threats to public health.
A spokesman for the VA said the agency will review “how and when we report to the National Practitioner Data Bank and state licensing boards.”
The review should be simple. There should be no way for a doctor or nurse, whose actions have been found worthy of termination, to hide from public scrutiny. We understand the double standard that our nation’s private health care system participates in the not-my-problem-anymore doctor shuffling game, too.
But we must expect more of our public institutions, especially one that cares for our veterans.
USA Today reporters Donovan Slack and Michael Sallah tracked down the harm of such practices, focusing on a podiatrist who was blamed for “one botched surgery after another.”
Among the foot doctor’s victims was April Wood, who had surgery in 2004 that left her in so much pain she elected in 2012 to have her leg amputated from the knee down.
Five months after her amputation the VA notified her of concerns about the doctor who performed her original surgery. The VA said a review of her medical files showed the doctor “had improperly fused her bones, leaving her heel permanently arched higher than the ball of her foot.”
That surgery likely accounted for the chronic pain that led to Wood’s amputation, the VA concluded in its investigation.
According to USA Today, the VA policy is to notify patients as soon as possible of medical mistakes. It took the VA two years after the podiatrist’s clinical privileges were revoked to notify patients like Wood, and neither state licensing boards nor the federal database were ever told of the investigation. That’s embarrassingly unacceptable. The members of The Denver Post’s editorial board are William Dean Singleton, chairman; Mac Tully, CEO and publisher; Chuck Plunkett, editor of the editorial pages; Megan Schrader, editorial writer; and Cohen Peart, opinion editor.