On January 4, his final day as chairman of the House Veteran Affairs Committee, U.S. Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.) kept his promise to area veterans and citizens by returning to St. Louis and the John Cochran VA Medical Center, to speak to patients and staff about ongoing patient care issues at the facility. Filner and U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan of Missouri spoke to reporters at Carnahan’s St. Louis office before touring the facility.
Six months after Filner held hearings in St. Louis about equipment sterilization problems at Cochran’s dental clinic, he said there has been no word from the VA about holding anyone accountable for exposing more than 1,800 veterans to potentially deadly viruses due to improper sterilization techniques or any official report on changes or improvements.
“There may be a good reason why it’s taking longer. The sterilization issues really reveal the tip of an iceberg for other problems -other management problems, morale problems, staff problems at Cochran,” Filner said. “It’s not a secret that in the various surveys that are given at every hospital in the country, for patient satisfaction, that Cochran is at the bottom.”
Reports from the two independent bodies investigating problems at Cochran – the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office – are expected to be made public by mid-Spring, Carnahan said. He said a third, internal VA investigation was reportedly concluded in November but has yet to be made public.
Cochran is scheduled to undergo a $440 million modernization, and Filner hopes the culture of the workplace will be renovated along with the structure.
“I am hopeful that when we get the money for modernization, that the VA will use that occasion to modern the culture so that Cochran will not be at the bottom of the patient satisfaction, but at the very top,” Filner said.
Two vets who are also nurses employed at Cochran spoke of the lack of reciprocal communication from their superiors and said requests on behalf of patients are very slow or ignored. One is Wes Gordon, a Cochran registered nurse who spoke with Carnahan and Filner about repeated requests for applesauce. Medicine is ground into the applesauce to administer medicine to patients who cannot swallow. Gordon said it took over two years to be addressed. And when he brought in his own supply of applesauce, he was immediately reprimanded.
“This is unacceptable in an organization that is supposed to be patient-focused,” said Carnahan.
“As a veteran, it has been very disheartening to have to come to work and see some of the things I am seeing, and not feeling like, as a nurse on the floor, that things have not been done well enough for the veterans,” said Glenda Skinner, another Cochran nurse. “The veterans have given to us by serving. The care that they receive should be well above average. They deserve very bit of the best care possible, and I just don’t see that that has been happening.”
Gordon and Skinner are two of four nurses who met with the congressmen earlier in the day and detailed some of the problems the hospital, including:
- Oxygen tubing for respiratory assistance is chronically broken or unavailable;Â
- Tools that could provide time-critical diagnoses, such as fundoscopes, are unavailable, despite over three years of regular requests;Â
- Lack of disposable equipment in “isolation rooms,” which is important in preventing the transmission of infectious diseases from one patient to another;Â
- Too few nurses and nursing aides are assigned to too many patients, compromising nurses’ ability to provide proper care and resulting in patients going days without baths or clean linens.
“When I have two veterans who are in respiratory distress and I cannot find oxygen tubing or flow meters for oxygen to be given, that becomes an issue for me,” Skinner said. “I just don’t see how we can give the best care if we don’t have the equipment and the staffing.”
In response, Marcena Gunter of the St. Louis VA Medical Center emailed a response to The American, late Tuesday, which included the following statement:
“Since these issues were identified, the Medical Center has taken strong action including hiring a new chief of logistics, purchasing additional equipment, and resetting supply levels to reduce the quantity of lesser used supplies and to increase the availability of higher used supplies.”
The new Republican chairman of the veteran affairs committee is U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, who was at the hearing in St. Louis last summer. Filner said Miller pledged his support to continue probing to get to the bottom of what is happening at Cochran.
