Veterans in the greater Los Angeles area spend months, even years waiting for exams. The VA Greater Los Angeles Medical Center says that the backlog of requests constantly grows faster than they can provide exams and service to veterans in the area.
Oliver Mitchell, a Marine veteran worked the VAGLAMC until he was fired reporting the intentional destruction of veterans’ medical records. In an interview with The Daily Caller, Mitchell stated:
“The committee was called System Redesign and the purpose of the meeting was to figure out ways to correct the department’s efficiency. And one of the issues at the time was the backlog.
“We just didn’t have the resources to conduct all of those exams. Basically we would get about 3,000 requests a month for [medical] exams, but in a 30-day period we only had the resources to do about 800. That rolls over to the next month and creates a backlog. It’s a numbers thing. The waiting list counts against the hospitals efficiency. The longer the veteran waits for an exam that counts against the hospital as far as productivity is concerned.”
“[By 2008, some patients were] waiting six to nine months for an exam” and VA “didn’t know how to address the issue.”
“[VA Greater Los Angeles Radiology Department Chief Dr. Suzie El-Saden initiated an] ongoing discussion in the department [to cancel exam requests and destroy veterans’ medical files so that no record of the exam requests would exist, thus reducing the backlog.]”
“That actually happened. We had that discussion in November 2008 and then in March 2009 they started to delete the exams. Once you cancel or delete an order it automatically cancels out that record [so that no record of the exam requests remained.]”
