Delays, Lost Paperwork Persist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington Post Reports

Patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are continuing to encounter problems with lost paperwork and delays in appointments, months after President Bush and Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates promised to make "swift changes" to improve the care that soldiers were receiving at the military facility, the Washington Post reports (Priest/Hull, Washington Post, 9/15). Earlier this year, a Post series detailed poor conditions for people receiving outpatient care at Walter Reed (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 5/3).

After the series was published, the Army "moved swiftly" to fix the outpatient system and established three panels to examine the "entire overburdened military medical care system" for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Post. Despite these efforts, patients and family members continue to complain about the obstacles facing veterans, including a lack of information and explanation of options given with discharge papers, the long disability process, excessive bureaucracy and rotating staff, all resulting in inadequate care, the Post reports.

The Post profiles Walter Reed patient Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon, who has faced repeated delays in being discharged from the hospital. "I've been sitting here for three years," Shannon, who has post-traumatic stress disorder, said. He added, "I don't even know what 'going on with my life' means. I want to scream at the top of my lungs. I'm at the end of my rope." Charles Dasey, a Walter Reed spokesperson, said that in Shannon's case there was a "failure of paying attention to the currency of his paperwork" (Washington Post, 9/15).

VA Not Meeting Goals on PTSD
PTSD programs geared toward treating returning soldiers in some cases are not receiving enough funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs, resulting in some failures to meet internal standards, according to internal reports acquired by McClatchy Newspapers through a Freedom of Information Act request, McClatchy/Baltimore Sun reports. While the VA's PTSD treatment is generally effective, according to the reports, nearly one-third of the VA's inpatient and other intensive PTSD units failed to meet at least one of six quality goals monitored by a VA health research organization, with the data suggesting "considerable variability" across the VA in the delivery of some PTSD services.

The information is based on two annual reports produced by a VA mental health research office on spending and quality. The reports previously were available on the VA's Web site, but they were removed in the past year. McClatchy obtained the most recent reports, for fiscal year 2006, under a FOIA request. According to one of the reports, the number of veterans treated grew more than 4% from 2005 to 2006, while the number of appointments the VA provided increased 1%, meaning that the average number of visits per veteran decreased (McClatchy/Baltimore Sun, 9/16).