Did the Department of Veterans Affairs fail to report on potentially dangerous doctors? The Government Accountability Office (GAO) seems to think so. According to the watchdog group, the VA “failed to report 90% of potentially dangerous medical providers in recent years to a national database designed to prevent them from crossing state lines and endangering patients elsewhere.”
Did the Department of Veterans Affairs fail to report on potentially dangerous doctors? The Government Accountability Office (GAO) seems to think so. According to the watchdog group, the VA “failed to report 90% of potentially dangerous medical providers in recent years to a national database designed to prevent them from crossing state lines and endangering patients elsewhere.”
The watchdog’s report is due to be released on Monday, and the conclusions in the report “confirm findings of a recent USA TODAY investigation that found the VA has for years concealed medical mistakes and misconduct by health care workers.” The news agency’s initial report also found that “oversight was so lax, the VA had no idea how many medical workers had been reported or if they had been reported at all.” In addition, the GAO also discovered that officials and medical workers employed with the VA weren’t reporting “any of the problem clinicians to state medical boards that could have yanked their licenses.”
So how did the GAO get its data? What are the findings based on? Well, according to the watchdog group, the findings are “based on a sampling of five VA hospitals, where only nine health care workers warranted reporting since 2014.” However, as the report points out, if the findings “hold true across all of the VA’s roughly 150 hospitals, potentially hundreds of medical providers weren’t reported.”
But just how potentially dangerous are some of the doctors the GAO hopes to draw attention to? Well, one of the examples the GAO looked at for its report was a case where a “VA hospital director failed to report a clinician who went on to work at a private sector hospital, which revoked the worker’s privileges two years later, suggesting patients were endangered.”
How did the VA respond to the GAO report? For starters, “VA officials reiterated it’s pledge…to overhaul its policies for reporting clinicians to authorities.” It also “concurred with its findings and said they planned to increase oversight of reporting by regional officials,” a task that has largely been left to local hospital directors to make. On top of that, Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, actually asked the “GAO to investigate.”
So what are current VA policies in place that are supposed to prevent instances like the cases examined in the GAO report? Are there any? The short answer is yes. According to current VA policies, “hospitals are supposed to report to the national database doctors and dentists who leave while under investigation for medical mistakes or when their clinical credentials are curtailed or revoked because of poor care. They are also supposed to report medical providers to state licensing authorities if they raise reasonable concern for the safety of patients.” Okay, seems pretty clear here, so why didn’t the five unidentified hospitals in the GAO report follow these existing VA policies?
According to the GAO report, “providers weren’t reported as required because VA officials were generally not familiar with or misinterpreted the policies.” In another case, the report found one facility where “officials failed to report six providers to the national database because the officials were unaware that they had been delegated responsibility for…reporting.” In addition, the report also discovered that “VA hospitals did not adequately document investigations of medical care that can lead to reports.”
At the end of the day, the GAO report left the VA with a few recommendations, including that it “ensure reviews are documented, that they are conducted more quickly and that they are overseen by regional officials, who can ensure problem medical workers are reported.” In response, the VA said “it would have those fixes in place within a year.”
Sources:
VA failed to report 90% of potentially dangerous medical providers, GAO confirms
Watchdog: VA centers failed to report potentially dangerous doctors
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