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Walter Reed / Military Medical Scandal
Walter Reed official touts new medical care units
Kristin M. Hall, Associated Press
FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — The deputy commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center said Thursday that wounded soldiers are healing faster and returning to duty quicker in new specialized medical care units.
Brig. Gen. Michael S. Tucker visited a warrior transition unit at Fort Campbell and toured new barracks designed for injured soldiers. Some of the rooms are designed for soldiers in wheelchairs with lowered sinks and beds and larger showers.
Tucker, who has just been appointed assistant surgeon general for warrior care transition, said the Army has 10,000 soldiers who can’t deploy because of medical issues.
The Pentagon created the units after problems were discovered at Walter Reed. Each soldier in the unit is assigned a primary care manager, a case manager and a squad leader. However, a Government Accountability Office report last month found that more than half of the 35 new medical units were not fully staffed.
Tucker said the Army is still working to staff those units and expects to have data early next year to prove the units are providing quicker medical care.
“Our length of stay in a [warrior transition unit] is 180 days,” said Tucker, noting that units are averaging a 79 percent return to duty. “That is starting to draw back, which means I’m achieving efficiency.”
Sgt. Maj. David Allard, commander of Fort Campbell’s WTU, said they have more than 300 wounded soldiers to care for. Squad leaders make sure soldiers are going to doctors’ appointments, following their medication orders and help them through rehabilitation.
Many soldiers are returning from deployment from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental, as well as physical, medical problems. But the Army was slow to realize the impact of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, Tucker said.
“We had an awareness problem,” he said. “We had to train our leaders into knowing what their responsibilities were and to get the soldier the proper care.”
Tucker said the military cannot leave another generation of war veterans unprepared to take care of themselves after their military service.
“We’ve got to give them the skills to be successful, to be providers for their families,” he said, adding that the Army is reviewing personality disorder discharges to see if the soldiers were actually suffering from PTSD or TBI.
Every discharge now has to go through a screening for those disorders, he said.
“We’re going back to account for that,” Tucker said. “The Army isn’t going to look the other way.”
Sgt. Aaron Manis, 29, spent six months at Walter Reed after being shot by a sniper during a tour in Iraq. He was one of the first soldiers to enter Fort Campbell’s warrior transition unit and said he’s seen improvements to the Army’s health care system over the past year.
“Less soldiers are being lost in the process,” Manis said.
Vets group stands tall for sick GIs
Denver Post — An Army general said Wednesday that a “Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade” would come soon to Fort Carson. It will help soldiers with post-traumatic stress and brain injuries.
As Brig. Gen. Michael Tucker spoke at Colorado’s Mountain Post, no one from Veterans for America stood beside him.
They should have. VFA played as big a role in Tucker’s announcement as any of Fort Carson’s brass.
Veterans for America, a group run by ex-military personnel, has forced the Army’s hand across the country by exposing bad treatment of soldiers who return from war with psychological wounds.
“What we do, plus the debacle of Walter Reed, has made them do things,” said VFA’s director of veterans affairs, Steve Robinson.
Before whistle-blowers attracted media attention, sick soldiers were being ignored or even forced from the military without the support they needed.
“We use media as a last resort,” said Robinson, “when we can’t get the attention of people who can make changes.”
Fort Carson conveniently announced formation of the Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade the week before nine senators send staff members to Carson. The senatorial staffers will investigate claims of inadequate health treatment of soldiers. Guess who raised the charges?
That’s right - Veterans for America.
Robinson said he met in Washington, D.C., on Monday with Tucker, the deputy commanding general of Walter Reed Medical Center and the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command.
“I gave him 10 cases of soldiers who had not gotten the correct treatment,” Robinson said. By Thursday, nine of those 10 soldiers had told Robinson that the general had interviewed them.
Yet to hear Tucker talk at Fort Carson, you would not know that VFA played any role in his trip to Colorado.
Instead, Tucker spoke of Fort Carson as “a great example of what right looks like.” In fact, Robinson and other advocates say, Fort Carson has made positive changes in health care for soldiers. The post does offer care models for other military bases.
But too often, it had to be embarrassed into action.
“Leaders at the unit level still don’t understand how to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury,” said Robinson. “Without help, people with PTSD turn to drinking and drugs. People with traumatic brain injury have discipline and anger issues. And yet they still say that PTSD and brain injury are not an excuse for bad behavior.”
Veterans for America’s latest charge is that the Army is forcing out some soldiers with war-related post-traumatic stress by claiming they have pre-existing personality disorders.
It is just one more thing in a years-long pattern. “Without (Veterans for America), more people would have killed themselves,” said an ex-Special Forces soldier who spent months in “medical hold” at Fort Carson in 2004 awaiting treatment.
The man didn’t want his name published. He feared the military would try to take away his disability benefits.
Problems treating post-traumatic stress or brain injury “were not going to go away without pressure and oversight” from outside the military, the ex-soldier said. “When I was (at Fort Carson), they just wanted to get soldiers with problems out of the service without giving them adequate care. In my case, if I didn’t have a medical background, I wouldn’t have gotten the treatment I needed.”
That’s a searing indictment. Almost as bad was a Fort Carson spokesman’s reaction to recent Veterans for America complaints. “They’ve said it a thousand times, and we’ve responded a thousand times, and we’re not going to get into it today,” the spokesman said.
Veterans for America has surely been a pain in the military’s butt, but if the Walter Reed scandal and the establishment of a Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade prove anything, it is this:
Without groups like Veterans for America, this country’s war casualties would be victims of tunnel vision as deadly as friendly fire.
Jim Spencer, Denver Post
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
Panel on Walter Reed Woes Issues Strong Rebuke
The New York Times — An independent panel assessing dilapidated facilities and red tape for wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Wednesday issued a sweeping indictment of leadership failures, inadequate training and staffing shortages.
The panel, headed by two former secretaries of the Army, Togo D. West Jr. and John O. Marsh Jr., found that a high standard of care for troops when they were first evacuated from war zones and hospitalized fell apart when they became outpatients, with a “breakdown in health services” and “compassion fatigue” on the part of overworked staff members.
“Leadership at Walter Reed should have been aware of poor living conditions and administrative hurdles and failed to place proper priority on solutions,” the panel said in a summary of its draft report released at a meeting at Walter Reed.
The report called the current system for assessing soldiers’ disabilities “extremely cumbersome, inconsistent, and confusing,” saying it must be “completely overhauled.” It called for the creation of a “center of excellence” on treatment, training and research on two conditions suffered by thousands of troops in Iraq: traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The panel, called the Independent Review Group, was appointed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February after The Washington Post reported on the problems at Walter Reed, the Army’s century-old medical center in Washington. A presidential commission and a Department of Veterans Affairs task force are also assessing the troubles.
The conditions at Walter Reed, including moldy, rat-infested quarters and a bureaucratic maze that left severely injured soldiers in limbo for months, have become a symbol of the government’s broader failure to help troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush visited patients at the facility March 30 and said, “I apologize for what they went through, and we’re going to fix the problem.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates, Cynthia O. Smith, said Wednesday that he “welcomes the findings and believes our wounded warriors deserve the best treatment possible both as inpatients and outpatients.”
The initial reports in February led to a shake-up of Army leadership. Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey fired Walter Reed’s commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, and replaced him with Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army surgeon general.
But critics said General Kiley had been told about the problems and failed to act. Mr. Gates then publicly criticized the Army’s response as inadequate, and both Mr. Harvey and General Kiley stepped down.
Since then, the Army has moved aggressively to make improvements at Walter Reed. Patients have been moved out of the most squalid building. Some 28 new case managers have been added to help wounded soldiers navigate the medical system. A telephone hot line has been opened and information handbooks have been distributed to families of wounded service members.
In remarks at Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. West, a former military lawyer who served as both secretary of the Army and secretary of veterans affairs under President Bill Clinton, strongly criticized the tortuous bureaucracy that assesses soldiers’ disabilities.
“The horrors inflicted on our wounded service members and their families in the name of the physical disability review process simply must be stopped,” Mr. West said.
He said the Army’s system currently requires four proceedings before an official board, causing delays and excessive paperwork and producing “inexplicable differences in standards and results.”
“We can and must do better,” he said.
Mr. West also said the panel concluded there was inadequate understanding of how to diagnose and treat the brain injuries that have become a signature of the Iraq war, where thousands of troops have been wounded by improvised explosive devices, and the mental effects of long exposure to the constant threat of attack.
“We believe there is a need for greater and better coordinated research in this area,” he said.
Under legislation introduced Wednesday by Senators Evan Bayh of Indiana and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, both Democrats, troops suffering from traumatic brain injuries would be kept on active duty, rather than being retired, so they would receive more medical attention.
Steve Robinson, a longtime veterans’ advocate with Veterans for America, said he welcomed the findings of the review panel. But he said the panel should address the problems of discharged soldiers who were not getting V.A. benefits they needed.
“What are we going to do about the thousands of people who have unjustifiably lost their V.A. benefits forever?” Mr. Robinson said. “It’s not enough just to fix the problems starting from the point that President Bush went to Walter Reed.”
SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times
Walter Reed is Not a Photo Op
The Huffington Post — I just learned that President Bush will visit Walter Reed tomorrow afternoon. The President should use his visit to gather first-hand accounts from our newly injured soldiers. He should use this trip to become more aware of the appalling state of military and veterans health care in this country, and he should use this trip to reinforce the responsibility that he has to ensure that our service members and veterans receive care for their injuries that is worthy of their sacrifices.
If the President uses this trip as an opportunity to justify a veto of the supplemental, then SHAME ON HIM. Walter Reed is still broken. The DoD healthcare system in this country is still broken. The social contract between our country and those it sends to war is broken. Now is the time for action.
Tomorrow cannot be a photo op; it cannot be a political stunt. Our troops need their Commander in Chief to start working harder for them. President Bush should visit the areas of Walter Reed where our soldiers are suffering because of our neglect. He should visit Ward 54, where soldiers are suffering from acute mental health conditions. He should visit the decrepit outpatient holding facilities where our soldiers are waiting close to a year to get processed out of the Army. Congress, the media, and the American people need to send a strong message that we will not tolerate any more political maneuvering at the expense of our troops.
President’s Visit to Walter Reed: Statement of Veterans for America
Veterans for America brought the Walter Reed story to light, and we are working tirelessly to expose and solve the widespread failures within DoD and the VA.
Statement: From Bobby Muller, President, Veterans for America
Walter Reed is Not a Photo Op.
The President should use his visit to gather first-hand accounts from our newly injured soldiers. He should use this trip to become more aware of the appalling state of military and veterans health care in this country, and he should use this trip to reinforce the responsibility that he has to ensure that our service members and veterans receive care for their injuries that is worthy of their sacrifices.
If the President uses this trip as an opportunity to justify a veto of the supplemental, then shame on him.
Walter Reed is still broken.
The DoD healthcare system is still broken.
The social contract between our country and those it sends to war is broken.
Now is the time for action. Tomorrow cannot be a photo op; it cannot be a political stunt.
Our troops need their Commander in Chief to start working harder for them.
President Bush should visit the areas of Walter Reed where our soldiers are suffering because of our neglect. He should visit Ward 54, where soldiers are suffering from acute mental health conditions. He should visit the decrepit outpatient holding facilities where our soldiers are waiting close to a year to get processed out of the Army.
Congress, the media, and the American people need to send a strong message that we will not tolerate any more political maneuvering at the expense of our troops.
Veterans for America works closely with Congress, the media and the American people to increase awareness and develop immediate and long-term solutions for the shattered system failing our service members and veterans. Veterans for America can comment on: veterans legislation (case workers, special needs populations – National Guard and Women), mental health challenges at Walter Reed that are being ignored, Traumatic Brain Injury, the impact presidential/congressional visits have on soldier’s care, and the failure of Congress to pass vital service member/veterans legislation as part of the supplemental.
