VOICE OF THE MAJORITY

The below article had to be posted. Look at the rear end of any high- end car with A "W" sticker on it and you will see a magnetic yellow ribbon that says "Support Our Troops". It makes you wonder, just how these right -wingers support the troops when you read articles like this. The VA hospitals MUST be fixed so that we can serve all of those who are serving in Iraq. A Democrat can support our troops by doing everything and anything to bring them home. Anyway, here goes the article:

Outside review critical of VA hospital
Official depicts many issues as minor, says changes under way
By DOUG J. SWANSON / The Dallas Morning News
An outside investigation has found that the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center fails to meet multiple standards of patient care and safety. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations this week released preliminary findings of a "special unannounced survey" conducted at the Oak Cliff hospital. The commission cited the Dallas VA for, among other problems, not dispensing medications safely, not maintaining fire-safety equipment properly and not affording patients "an appropriate environment." Hospital management has 90 days to respond to the commission, the country's leading hospital accreditation group. In response, Betty Bolin Brown, acting director of the VA North Texas Health Care System, said in a letter to employees released Thursday that improvements are under way. "Some have been completed and others are close to completion," she wrote. The review was prompted by a complaint about the Dallas VA, said commission spokesman Mark Forstneger. Such a review "is a rare occurrence," he said, noting that less than 2 percent of complaints trigger unannounced surveys. The findings that the commission disclosed publicly contained only broad outlines of "requirements for improvement." They are necessary for the hospital to maintain its level of accreditation. The interim director's letter to employees included more detail and depicted many of the problems as relatively minor. According to the director's letter, some of the shortcomings cited by the commission are: •Two or more types of insulin were not segregated in some refrigerators. •Fire sprinkler deficiencies "were not being completed in a timely manner." •The hospital did not have sufficient documentation to show that all surgeons were engaging in a "time-out" preoperative pause, which is designed to help eliminate mistakes in surgery. •In the emergency department and recovery room, privacy curtains were not always closed. •"There is a lack of analysis of observations" regarding sanitary and environmental conditions at the medical center. All those problems are being addressed, the director said in her letter. In November, the inspector general's office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported that it found the Dallas hospital to be dirty, dangerous to patients and badly managed. The inspector general also noted that the medical center ranked last among all VA hospitals in its adherence to "national performance measures." Dallas hospital officials said in January that all problems found by the inspector general had been fixed. Since December, several upper-level personnel changes have occurred at the medical center. The director has retired, the chief of nursing services has been removed and the chief of medical staff has resigned.

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Tuesday, March 15, 2005