#Middlebury #VeteransPost
David Shulkin is gone. No matter how he came to exit the building, whether he quit or was fired, he’s gone. Now the president has nominated his own personal physician to head the Department of Veterans Affairs.
No matter who ends up being the new VA Secretary, he will need to clean house. He should call a powwow with leadership in the VA Office of the Inspector General and ask for summaries on all of the VA regional medical facilities. If there are facilities that keep getting bad inspection reports, maybe that’s where the first heads need to roll.
Non-management employees need to be given a voice. Whether it’s a clerk who is instructed to fiddle with appointment times, or an accounting assistant who sees funny business with the numbers, they all need the means to point out what is wrong. Even if it’s nothing more than a suggestion box read daily by high-ups, the people down in the trenches need a way to make fixes without fearing for their jobs.
It was whistleblowers who first brought to light the serious problems at the Washington, D.C., VA Medical Center. I suspect they were nursing staff who couldn’t properly care for the patients when supplies kept running out. Whistleblowers are our first line of defense when it comes to suffering shoddy care. They need to be encouraged to come forward more often.
The new secretary needs to send out a strong message from Day One that sneaky and entitled employees should head for the doors. That will include the secretary’s personal staff.
Most of all, the new secretary needs to be personally sharp enough not to do things like accept freebie Wimbledon tickets and assume that no one will ever find out.
(c) 2017 King Features Synd. Inc.
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