Can the VA be trusted?

VA understates patient waiting times, IG says

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Sep 11, 2007 10:21:09 EDT

An inspector general report raises doubts about whether the Department of Veterans Affairs is doing a good job of reducing the waiting time for medical appointments.

A report released Monday said auditors found VA was understating waiting times by excluding some patients from the count and by claiming that some appointments were late because that was when veterans wanted to be seen, although there was no evidence in the patient files to verify such a claim.

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee chairman, called the report "disturbing" and described it as proof that "VA continues to skew its outpatient reports."

"This is simply not acceptable," Akaka said in a statement. "I am concerned that VA's underreporting of waiting times and backlog volumes makes it harder to identify problem facilities and allocate resources effectively."

A lack of reliable data makes it hard to set budgets or judge performance, Akaka said, adding that he also isn't pleased that VA is arguing over details of the report rather than concentrating on making improvements.

VA officials have been claiming that 96 percent of veterans seeking primary care and 95 percent of veterans seeking specialty care were seen within 30 days of their desired dates.

That is not what the inspector general report found.

In a review of 700 appointments where VA said everyone waited 30 days or less, auditors found 25 percent had waited longer. Auditors also found inaccurate waiting lists that made it hard to determine how long people had been waiting.

Ten facilities had a combined 53,531 veterans missing from their records. Auditors discovered that 62 percent of the veterans who were not on the lists had waited more than 30 days for their appointments to be scheduled.

In response, VA officials said many patients asked for appointments that involved more than a 30-day wait, but that should not be counted against meeting the goals because this was the veteran's own choice.

Auditors were unable to find evidence in the records to fully support that claim, and VA officials agreed that better record-keeping is needed.

In the report, auditors said they found "unexplained differences" in records of the waiting times, which left doubts about any claim of timely appointments.

They also found that some veterans were being considered "new" patients ?- and were not included in the calculation for determining waiting times ?- even though they were, in fact, established patients who were being seen at a specialty clinic where they had not been seen in at least two years.

Some patients waited for as long as 112 days for an appointment, the report said.

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