Patient care problems continue to plague the Phoenix VA Healthcare System, the center of a nationwide scandal that revealed employees kept secret lists to cover up patient wait times, a new report shows.
Two years after the scandal broke, a report (.pdf) released Tuesday by the Department of Veteran Affairs’ Office of Inspector General, shows that employees improperly canceled and delayed hundreds of consults for specialty-care in 2015 because they didn’t understand the proper procedures.
Of those, 74 were deemed inappropriate, and in 53 of those cases patients never received the requested care at the Phoenix facility. The untimely care led to the death of at least one patient, the report noted, because the patient never received an appointment for a cardiac exam that could have revealed the need for further treatment.
“More than two years after the Phoenix VA Health Care System became ground zero for VA’s wait-time scandal, many of its original problems remain, and this report is proof of that sad fact," Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement about the report findings.
The latest OIG report is the seventh it has issued in the past two years regarding allegations at the VA of abuse of policy, lack of access to care, scheduling and canceling of appointments, staffing and consult management. Despite efforts to improve care at the Phoenix facility, the problems remain. Indeed previous reports have indicated veterans wait as long as 71 days for care.
The OIG recommends that the Phoenix facility update its consult policy and improve consult management. But Miller said that he has doubts that the problems will ever be resolved. “The VA’s performance in Phoenix and across the nation will never improve until there are consequences up and down the chain of command for these and other persistent failures,” he said. “Unfortunately, given that this report is largely devoid of clear lines of accountability to those responsible for Phoenix VAHCS’s current problems, it is unlikely these issues will be solved anytime soon.”