COLUMBUS, Ohio – Anyone who expected things to have improved since a scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a billion-dollar solution will be disappointed.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
After the news broke last year that care at some facilities across the country was slow, sometimes dangerously so, and officials were hiding data to cover up long waits for appointments, Congress approved $16.3 billion to help the overwhelmed network.
Things were supposed to get better at Veterans Administration health-care clinics and hospitals.
But it looks like they didn’t.
According to a report in the Columbus Dispatch, the percentage of veterans suffering through long waits for treatments in many Ohio clinics, including those in central Ohio, has stayed the same or improved only slightly since then. In some, the situation got worse.
Government data reviewed by The Associated Press shows that the number of patients facing long waits at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics has not been dropping, despite reforms and a funding boost last summer.
U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald spent Wednesday at The Ohio State University, learning about programs and touring facilities that the university has created for veteran and military students.
As he was in Columbus, the AP was reporting that its investigation found nearly 900,000 medical appointments completed at about 1,000 VA facilities failed to meet the health system’s timeliness goal.
To see how things have changed since the influx of federal money and the spotlight on veterans’ care, the AP compiled VA data showing how many appointments each clinic completed monthly from September, which was after new federal rules about waiting times took effect, through February. It also looked at how many of those veterans waited longer than 30 days to be seen.
Many of those delays were clustered in a handful of Southern states, the report said.
VA officials cite numerous efforts to ramp up capacity. They include building new health centers and adding 8,000 employees since April.
The Dispatch then examined the data for the clinics that central Ohio veterans are most likely to use and reported that, with the exception of a community-based VA clinic in Grove City, there was only marginal improvement.
The people who run the local VA health-care system say that six months isn’t enough time to make significant change and they didn’t expect the numbers to change dramatically.
“The message that gets lost in all of this is that if we have a veteran who needs care, we get them,” said Kelly Mikulecky, a health-systems specialist at the Chalmers P. Wylie Ambulatory Care Center on James Road (pictured above). It also oversees community-based outpatient clinics in Grove City, Marion, Newark and Zanesville.
Each clinic has walk-in appointments for urgent needs on days it is open, and the idea is to bump up the use of more non-traditional approaches to care (such as phone appointments with doctors or group appointments for patients needing help managing the same chronic disease) to improve the speed of care, Mikulecky said.
“We are, and always have been, constantly evaluating how we do things,” she said. “Right now, because of the spotlight nationally, we are a system stuck in the middle of change. I think when we look at these numbers a year from now, they’ll be much better.”
Joanne Kusko, another health-systems specialist in the Columbus network, also said the numbers will continue to improve. She also said that schedulers who work at the community-based clinic in the Chalmers network that saw the least amount of improvement (Marion, where the percentage of veterans waiting at least 30 days for care actually got slightly worse) were not properly trained after the new rules went into effect last fall and were coding appointments incorrectly.
Of the federal money that Congress appropriated to help solve the waiting-list problem, nearly $19.8 million filtered to Ohio. Of that, about $3.9 million went to the Chalmers care center for improvements there and at the clinics in its network.
With that additional funding, the Chalmers network will add the equivalent of almost 66 full-time employees. That includes five primary-care doctors and seven primary-care nurses; more than a dozen psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and nurse practitioners in mental health; and 27 new positions in specialties such as respiratory therapy and optometry. But few are in place yet.