CT veterans care system launches ‘hiring blitz’
WASHINGTON — The Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System has launched a “massive hiring blitz,” in anticipation that it may have to rapidly open more beds to care for the state’s 57,000 veterans, as more fall ill to the coronavirus.
“We’re trying to turn these around very quickly,” Director Alfred Montoya Jr. said.
A recent report by the Veterans Affairs Inspector General found that the VA Connecticut Health system, including its hospital in West Haven, was among nine VA health facilities around the country that lacked adequate nurse staffing to optimize care in wards and intensive care units during a surge of coronavirus cases.
The VA system in Connecticut had about 50 veterans test positive for COVID-19, as of Monday, with 12 receiving in-patient care, after testing over 400 veterans total, Montoya said. Fewer than 10 staff members had contracted the infectious disease as of Monday.
“It you look at our veterans population, a number of them are older so they fall into that higher category at risk and a number of them also have co-morbidities,” Montoya said. “At the beginning of last month, we made the hard decision to stop all elective surgeries to start limiting out-patients visits to get them to stay home as much as they can.”
Montoya also reported to the VA inspectors in late March that anticipated shortages of an HIV antiviral medication and two drugs — chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — that are being studied for the treatment of coronavirus and administered in some cases. Those shortages are now resolved, Montoya said last week.
Last week, a memo circulated among senior VA officials, saying the VA system was experiencing a “serious PPE shortage,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Soon, PPE will be rationed; one surgical mask issued per week, one N95 per day,” the memo said.
In the Inspector General’s report, 33 veterans hospitals said they had inadequate supplies of medical equipment like N-95 respirators, hand sanitizer, coronavirus testing kits and face shields. The Connecticut VA system reported no shortages.
“Every single morning at 8 o’clock I get a report of the supply of PPE we have here in house,” Montoya said. “At this point, we have enough PPE to keep our staff safe. Of course, we would always love more PPE.”
When asked by inspectors if the facility had written agreements to share ICU beds or personal protective equipment with the community — or transfer their patients to nonVA hospitals — the Connecticut VA system had none.
Montoya said the system is closely integrated with the Yale New Haven Health System, with which it shares doctors, and if it received a request from the state to share bed space or equipment, it would do so.
“We stand ready should there be a request that goes up through the governor’s office to ask for any kind of assistance whatsoever,” Montoya said.
In other parts of the country, the VA health system is working as a “bridge” to civilian hospitals, Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie said last week.
“I have ordered our veterans hospitals to begin preparing more than 1,500 beds to make them available both at the ICU and the acute-care level to the states and localities across the country,” Wilkie said. “As a result of that, we have opened up approximately 100 beds in the metropolitan New York area, in Brooklyn, and in Manhattan, and East Orange, New Jersey.”
Veterans hospitals have also supplied beds to their communities in Louisiana and Michigan, Wilkie said.