Problem and Solutions at the Veterans Health Administration
The chances are good that most Americans have either received health care services from the Department of Veterans Affairs’s (VA’s) Veterans Health Administration (VHA) directly or from a physician that has received training from a VA teaching facility. This likelihood is due to the fact that the VA not only operates the nation’s largest integrated health care network, but also provides vital training opportunities for more than half of the doctors practicing in the United States today. Given the critical role that the VA plays in the nation’s health care system, identifying constraints to the quality of care provided by VA practitioners and opportunities to improve them represent timely and valuable enterprises. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the VA and the wide array of challenges it faces in delivering high quality patient care today and in the future, followed by some recommended solutions to help achieve this outcome. Finally, the paper provides a summary of the research and important findings concerning the current substandard health care at the VA and what can be done to improve this care for the nation’s veteran heroes.

Review and Analysis

The VA’s VHA operates the largest integrated health care system in the United States which provides medical services of all types at 1,255 health care facilities (About VHA, 2020). This total includes 170 tertiary medical centers and 1,074 community-based outpatient clinics which treat more than nine million enrolled veteran patients each year (About VHA, 2020). This figure, of course, means that the VHA handles tens of millions of individual patient visits each years, and it is not surprising that any organization with such a massive caseload would experience some problems from time to time. The problems at the VHA, however, are longstanding and systemic, and many have intensified in severity in recent years despite having been made key organizational priorities.

When something is made a priority it is by definition supposed to get better, so it is clear that there is something wrong with the VHA that defies easy analysis and solutions. First and foremost -- and notwithstanding the critical role that is being played by the entire VA in fighting the ongoing Covid-19 virus pandemic, a fundamental part of the challenges facing the VHA at present and for the foreseeable future is the projected sustained...…patient wait times for clinic appointments and surgical procedures; and,

7. Assign key leadership responsibilities and establish clear bureaucratic reporting lines for the VHA’s suicide prevention program’s prevention media outreach campaign to ensure it is achieving is reaching at-risk veteran patients(Managing risks and improving VA health care, 2020).

The foregoing list is not exhaustive, of course, but it does represent an important starting point since it will help reframe the VHA’s organizational culture into one of accountability for substandard care.

Conclusion

With the nation’s understandable focus primarily on the ongoing Covid-19 virus pandemic, it is easy to overlook or even ignore the multiple problems that veterans routinely encounter when seeking health care from the VA’s Veterans Health Administration today. The research showed that despite a multi-billion dollar budget that has increased year-to-year, the VHA continues to suffer from a number of systemic problems that adversely affects it ability to deliver the high quality health care services that the nation’s veterans need and deserve. Perhaps the incoming Biden administration will take the substantive steps that are needed to address these longstanding problems, but millions of veterans will continue to suffer – many in silence – unless and until something is done.

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