Mat-Su VA needs reform, report says

WASHINGTON — The investigation into the Mat-Su veterans’ clinic requested by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski last summer has finally produced some results.

Murkowski called them “devastating and disappointing.”

In the health care inspection report produced by the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General released this week, researchers concluded that the Mat-Su VA Community Based Outpatient Clinic has been chronically overburdened with more patients than its small staff can handle. They found that “patient care was compromised by a lack of communication, care coordination, and follow-up,” and possibly by “insufficient processes in peer review, provider evaluation, and committee activity and reporting … and employee morale.”

Consequently, “the VA allowed veterans with serious health conditions to fall through the cracks, causing them to be denied potentially life-saving care,” Murkowski said.

The report describes nine cases of patients seeking care at the Mat-Su clinic during 2013 and 2014, some of whom perished as a direct, or indirect, result of administration and physician shortcomings.

The Office of Inspector General made nine recommendations to the Veterans Integrated Service Network director and system director to address these issues, including: “Implement an action plan that includes recruitment and retention of physicians to provide better access to care,” and, “Implement contingency plans for ensuring patients receive continuity of and access to appropriate primary care during periods of inadequate resources.”

Murkowski said she suspects the difficulty the VA has had in recruiting permanent physicians has a lot to do with salaries, which shouldn’t be an issue in a place like Wasilla.

“We were seemingly able to recruit medical professionals to IHS (Indian Health Service) hospitals up in Barrow or in Nome, places that are much higher cost, places that are clearly off the road system,” Murkowski said in a phone interview Thursday. “For somebody coming up from the Lower 48 … that’s kind of a tough sell, yet these facilities were able to hire people. And the VA, another federal system, isn’t able to keep medical professionals in Wasilla, on the road system, 40 miles from Anchorage? There’s something wrong here.”

As for a contingency plan, Alaska VA Healthcare System employees have been working with the Southcentral Foundation’s Valley Native Primary Care Center and other local community health centers to fill in the gaps at the Wasilla VA clinic, but that hasn’t exactly received the blessing of the national VA. Last May, VA said that, to ensure support for the veteran’s Choice Card — which provides “back-up” care if a veteran cannot be seen at a VA clinic in 30 days, or if the closest VA clinic is experiencing access issues — the Mat-Su clinic would have to essentially sever their unofficial, yet longstanding partnerships.

“That wasn’t going to work in Alaska either,” Murkowski said, so they’re in the process of restructuring things now.

“There’s still some uncertainty as to the funding going forward for this care that,

again, we’ve worked hard to establish,” Murkowski said. “I think our vets like it and we wanna ensure that it is able to continue.”

Alaska VA Healthcare System Director Susan Yeager concurred with the report’s recommendations, and in an April letter to the director of the Northwest Health Network, affirmed that changes have been made, or are in the process of being made. Target dates are Aug. 31 (recommendations 1, 2, 4, 5, 6) and Dec. 31 (3, 7, 8, 9), which Murkowski said she hopes will be met.

“I think that Susan Yeager does a good job,” she said. “I think she inherited a lot of issues with Alaska VA when she came on (in 2013), but I think she’s very committed to doing the right thing.”

“It may be that she’s got some folks within the system that are perhaps not as willing to embrace the necessary change that needs to happen, and she needs to be empowered to make those changes,” Murkowski added. “There is a big spotlight on Alaska VA right now and I think there’s a lot of pressure on Susan Yeager and her folks to address these (issues) in an exceptionally timely and expeditious manner.

To read the full report online, visit 1.usa.gov/1Hn62Ng.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.