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Organizational Development At The VA Term Paper

Organizational Development at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been a cabinet-level agency since 1989 that is tasked with providing an array of services to eligible veterans and their families (VA fact sheet, 2016). In recent years, the VA has experienced a number of organizational development-related problems including most especially delays in patient scheduling that demand viable solutions. To this end, this paper provides an overview of the VA and a description of an intervention project that can help this organization overcome its current constraints to the provision of high-quality administrative and healthcare services to the nation's veterans and their families. Finally, the paper concludes with a description of who would be contacted at the VA by an external organizational development (OD) consultant to coordinate a contract to address these problems.

Background information on the organization

At present, with nearly 280,000 workers on the rolls, the VA has more employees than any other government agency except the Department of Defense (VA fact sheet, 2016). While the VA is tasked with providing a wide range of services to veterans and their families, the most visible part of the VA is the Department of Health Services (DHS)...

In addition, the DHS trains about 90,000 new physicians each year and is the largest healthcare service in the United States today (VA fact sheet, 2016).
The problem(s) the selected organization faces

Beyond the high-profile cover-ups perpetrated by high-placed VA officials, there have been numerous delays in scheduling veterans for healthcare appointments in recent years that are believed responsible for causing hundreds of veteran deaths (VA fast facts, 2015). Complicating the problem is the growth in the number of patients who are eligible for VA health care due to two shooting wars and others on the horizon. In sum, these problems are already severe and current signs indicate they will get worse before they get better. The three most recent salient examples of these problems include the following:

1. December 15, 2014: The VA Inspector General releases a report that indicates a VA fact sheet contained misleading information, overstating the scope of its review of unresolved cases;

2. March 10, 2015: More than 1,600 veterans waited between 60 and 90 days for appointments at facilities operated by the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and about 400 veterans waited…

Sources used in this document:
References

Doing business with the VA. (2016). U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.va.gov/oal/business/dbwva.asp.

VA fact sheet. (2016). U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Retrieved from http://www. vacareers.va.gov/assets/common/print/fs_department_of_veterans_affairs.pdf.

VA fast facts. (2015, September 25). CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2014/05 / 30/us/department-of-veterans-affairs-fast-facts/.
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