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There is no excuse for negligence and abuse. Ever. I'm outraged.

Here's a post that I took off the Free Republic Site from someone that worked as a resident at the Dallas VA.

You would think that one could answer that question on a "yes" or "no" basis but I think that would be a hard thing to do. When I first saw the place I was truly horrified. After I'd been there for a while my opinions mellowed somewhat. I think one thing that was objectively true was that after say 6PM at night very little happened there. One reason for that was that DVAH was built in South Dallas miles away from the rest of the UT southwestern medical complex - the reason for this supposedly related to keeping it in some congressional district rather than another - i.e. it was done for political reasons. So there was this mass exodus of folks at 5PM to 6PM and there were skeleton services available at night. If you were getting walk in care and you didn't mind making a day of it (lines were long and so were waits) you probably got OK care. If you got real sick at 2 AM it was probably a different story.

And there were all sorts of other issues. Bureaucratic obstacles, essentially unionized staff that couldn't be fired, the fact that it was a "teaching" hospital for residents like us....Put it this way it wasn't the Mass General Hospital.

I once sent letters to congress because I would get paged from my home at night and I'd try to call in and the phone would ring like 80 times and the operator(s) wouldn't pick up the phone. Maybe they were "on break". Who knows. I would get so infuriated.

Bottom line, it's a different mindset and culture at a VA!

This describes as close as it comes to some of the experience that I had down through the years at poorly ran VA hospitals. Right down to the skeleton staff at night, the ringing telephone that no one answered, the staff that couldn't be fired, different experience from one shift to the other, one ward to the other.I believe the administrators are the prime cause of the chaos in VA's such as Dallas. They are poor managerswith bad attitudes towardour Veterans that encourages negligence and abuse on the part of staff.

I've seen it in more than one region of the country, up close and personal,through administrationsbothRepublican and Democratfor close to forty years now.Depressing.

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