VA makes little headway in effort to cut waits for care; facilities in South have worst stats

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The chronic delays plaguing the Veterans Affairs health system are concentrated in a fraction of its hospitals and clinics — many of them in the South — that have done far worse than others in delivering prompt care, according to government data reviewed by The Associated Press.

A year after Americans recoiled at revelations that sick veterans were getting sicker while languishing on waiting lists, VA statistics show that the number of patients facing long waits has not declined, even after Congress gave the department an extra $16.3 billion last summer to shorten waits for care.

Nearly 894,000 medical appointments completed at VA medical facilities from Aug. 1 to Feb. 28 failed to meet the VA's timeliness goal, which calls for patients to be seen within 30 days. Nearly 232,000 of those appointments involved a delay of longer than 60 days.

Since the summer, the number of vets waiting more than 30 or 60 days for non-emergency care has largely stayed flat. The number of medical appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete has nearly doubled.

Those delays were not spread evenly throughout the VA's vast network of hospitals and clinics.

Many were clustered at VA facilities in a handful of Southern states, often in areas with a strong military presence, a partly rural population, and patient growth that has easily outpaced the VA's sluggish planning process.

Of the 75 clinics and hospitals with the highest percentage of patients waiting more than 30 days for care, 12 are in Tennessee or Kentucky, 11 are in eastern North Carolina and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, 11 more are in Georgia and southern Alabama, and six are in north Florida.

Those 47 clinics and hospitals represent just a fraction of the more than 1,000 VA facilities nationwide, but they were responsible for more than one in five of the appointments that took longer than 60 days to complete, even though they accounted for less than 6 percent of patient visits.

The stark disparity between the haves and have-nots can be seen in places like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Jacksonville, Florida.

At the Minneapolis VA, one of the system's busiest medical centers, an average of 71 medical appointments completed each month involved a wait of more than 60 days. At the VA's outpatient clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, a facility handling just a third of the volume, that average was 1,186.

That means there were more vets experiencing extended delays at that one clinic in Florida than in the entire states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined.

VA officials say they are aware of the trouble spots. They cite numerous efforts to ramp up capacity by building new health centers and hiring more staff; between April and December, the system added a net 8,000 employees, including 800 physicians and nearly 2,000 nurses.

"I think what we are seeing is that as we improve access, more veterans are coming," Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Sloan Gibson told the AP.

He also acknowledged that the VA has historically been "not very adroit as a bureaucracy" in responding to those changes. It takes too long to plan and build new clinics when they are needed, he said, and the VA isn't flexible in its ability to reallocate resources to places that need them most.

"We are doing a whole series of things — the right things, I believe — to deal with the immediate issue," Gibson said. "But we need an intermediate term plan that moves us ahead a quantum leap, so that we don't continue over the next three or four years just trying to stay up. We've got to get ahead of demand."

The AP examined six months of appointment data at 940 individual VA facilities to gauge changes since a scandal over delays led to the resignation of the VA's secretary and prompted lawmakers in August to give the VA an additional $16.3 billion to hire doctors, open more clinics and build the new Choice program that allows patients facing long delays to get private-sector care. Data for individual facilities were not available for August.

Rosie Noel, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant who was awarded the Purple Heart in Iraq after rocket shrapnel slashed open her cheek and broke her jaw, has experienced the VA's troubles first hand.

First, she said, her physician failed to mention she needed the exam at all. Then, her first scheduled appointment in February 2014 was postponed due to another medical provider's "family emergency." She said her make up appointment at the VA hospital in Fayetteville, one of the most backed-up facilities in the country, was abruptly canceled when she was nearly two hours into the drive from her home in Sneads Ferry on the coast.

Noel said she was so enraged, she warned the caller that she had post-traumatic stress disorder, she wasn't going to turn around — and they better have security meet her in the lobby.

"I served my country. I'm combat wounded. And to be treated like I'm nothing is unconscionable," she said.

Meanwhile, relatively few VA facilities in the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast states reported having significant numbers of patients waiting extended periods for care.

Of the 940 hospitals and outpatient centers included in the AP analysis, 376 met the VA's timeliness standard better than 99 percent of the time. A little less than half of all VA hospitals and clinics reported averaging fewer than two appointments per month that involved a wait of more than 60 days.

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A SLOW PACE OF CHANGE

The Fayetteville VA hopes to celebrate its 75th anniversary this fall with the opening of a huge new outpatient health care center that could ease the types of chronic delays that caused Rosie Noel so much anxiety. (After her canceled exam, the VA paid for Noel to get care at a private-sector clinic; she doesn't have cervical cancer.)

With 250,000 square feet of usable space, the center will be almost as large as the main hospital building itself. The new campus will have 1,800 parking spots, a women's clinic and scores of new treatment rooms. It is sorely needed for a region that is home to two of America's largest military bases, the Army's Fort Bragg and the Marines' Camp Lejeune, and one of the highest concentrations of vets in the country. In two core counties, one in five adults is a veteran.

Yet the new building is also emblematic of the slow pace of change at the VA.

The hospital's director since 2010, Elizabeth Goolsby, cited the VA's failure to expand quickly as a primary reason for why eastern North Carolina now has some of the longest waits for care in the country.

"The contracting and building time in the Department of Veterans Affairs is a lengthy process," she said.

During her tenure in Fayetteville, Goolsby has opened new outpatient clinics in Wilmington, Goldsboro, Pembroke and Hamlet. All now rank among the VA locations with the highest percentage of appointments that fail to meet timeliness standards.

At the VA's clinic in Jacksonville— a small medical office built in a shopping plaza near Camp Lejeune's main gate in 2008 — nearly one in nine appointments completed between Sept. 1 and Feb. 28 involved a wait of longer than 60 days.

"It's not big enough to accommodate the number of veterans we are seeing or the number of providers we need," Goolsby acknowledged.

A new 15,000-square-foot clinic is under construction to serve the area around Camp Lejeune. The VA also is trying to develop a clinic in Sanford, north of Fort Bragg. And there have been stopgap measures, like the construction of modular buildings at the Fayetteville hospital this winter to host mental health clinics, and an emergency lease for a temporary medical office that allowed it to bolster staff in Jacksonville.

The clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, was also practically brand new. It opened in 2013 with the express intent of improving access to care in a fast-growing city with a lot of military retirees and a close relationship with three U.S. Navy bases: Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport and the Kings Bay Naval Base.

But like other VA facilities built recently in spots now struggling with long waits, the clinic took so long to plan and build — 12 years — that it was too small the day it opened, despite late design changes that added significantly more space.

"Even our best demographic models didn't anticipate the rate at which the growth would occur," said Nick Ross, the assistant director for outpatient clinics at the VA's North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System.

In recent months, the clinic has been enrolling another 25 new patients per day — a growth rate that would require the VA to hire another doctor, nurse and medical support assistant every 10 weeks to keep up with demand, said Thomas Wisnieski, the health system's director.

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RURAL RECRUITING CHALLENGES

After years of planning, a large, new outpatient center also is scheduled to open this fall to expand care offered at the VA medical center in Montgomery, Alabama.

That expansion also is long overdue. Among the VA's full-service medical centers, the Montgomery VA had the highest percentage of appointments that took longer than 30 days to complete. More than one in 11 appointments completed between September and February failed to meet timeliness standards. A sister hospital, a short drive to the east in Tuskegee, was No. 2.

There's no guarantee, though, that a new building will help the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System solve one of its other longstanding problems — a difficulty recruiting enough doctors and specialists needed to handle demand.

"They are on the frontier of some of the most medically underserved areas of the country," said Dr. William Curry, associate dean for primary care and rural health at University of Alabama School of Medicine.

That could mean that veterans who might otherwise get care in the private sector are more reliant on the VA. It also has historically meant big challenges recruiting physicians, who can make more money in metropolitan areas.

"Not a lot of medical students want to go work for the VA in a rural community medical clinic," said Dr. Kevin Dellsperger, chief medical officer at the Georgia Regents Medical Center and former chief of staff at the VA medical center in Iowa City, Iowa.

Dr. Srinivas Ginjupalli, acting chief of staff for the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System, confirmed that recruiting is a challenge, but he said the VA has been boosting salaries since the summer in an attempt to be more competitive in attracting staff.

Goolsby cited similar rural recruiting problems in her enterprise, which serves a sprawling region of hog farms and tobacco fields. Other VA officials said difficulty attracting health care providers to remote or poor parts of the country was an issue throughout the system.

NO EASY FIX

A few places struggling the most with long waits did report improvements.

At the VA in Montgomery, Alabama, the percentage of appointments that take longer than 30 days to complete has fallen from 12.6 percent in September to 6.4 percent in February. That's still a bad number compared to other VA hospitals but, looking at performance only in February, it would be enough improvement to take the hospital from worst to third in terms of the percentage of delays.

The VA's most chronically delayed outpatient clinic throughout the summer and fall, located in Virginia Beach, Virginia, reported improvement, too. In September, 24 percent of its patient visits were delayed by at least 30 days. By February, that had fallen to 11 percent — still terrible, but much better.

The VA site that had the most trouble meeting the VA's timeliness standard during the whole six-month period reviewed by the AP was a small clinic near Fort Campbell in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. One in five appointments took longer than 30 days to complete, and the rate has gotten steadily worse over time.

ID cards for the program were mailed starting in November, but many vets still don't understand how it works. It theoretically is open to patients who can't been seen within 30 days, or who have to drive longer distances for care, but enrollees still have to get VA approval to see a private-sector doctor and only some physicians participate in the payment system.

Obama's secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert McDonald, has cautioned that it will take time for reforms to make a difference.

He also warned in recent testimony to Congress that the system may still be decades away from seeing peak usage by the generation of servicemen and servicewomen who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Total enrollees in the VA system have ballooned from 6.8 million in 2002 to 8.9 million in 2013. During that same period, outpatient visits have soared from 46.5 million to 86.4 million annually; patient spending has grown from $19.9 billion to $44.8 billion; the number of patients served annually has grown from 4.5 million to 6 million.

McDonald told Congress the number of mental health outpatient visits alone is up 72 percent from 2005.