Posted on Nov 16, 2017
Vet Who Sought VA Help Was Told To Come Back In 3 Months. He Killed Himself Instead.
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Posted 7 y ago
Responses: 3
A tragedy by any measure, there is far to much information not available to truly make an informed as to what happened here. Many veterans who "NO SHOW" won't keep contact information up to date, it's very hard to schedule an appointment with "this number is no longer in service" and "return to sender", 3 months does seem excessive for an appointment however, but there could be more to it than what is noted here, many patients will state they can only come on certain days of the week due to jobs, or other circumstances, then say they couldn't get timely appointments because that specific day of the week had 1 day falling on a holiday, and a second where the Dr. was on vacation, with a host of other people waiting that time as well creating a backlog. There really is not enough information here to know if VA was at fault or not, and investigation and findings are sometimes not as simple as they seem or fail to consider relevant facts.
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Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen
Delay in getting an appointment seems to be systematic with the VA. Seems to me that they should be able to come up with some type of screening system that can identify individuals with life threatening issues on that first contact. As you say there is a lot of information not given but this is the type of thing you see about the VA in the news from all over the country. Delay in getting that first appointment is not unique to VA, a 2 or 3 month wait isn't unusual in the civilian world but there is a system that allows evaluation of a patient's need. Just don't see that in VA. Their attitude is here's the wait time, take it or leave it.
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