The VA healthcare system is the largest healthcare provider in the U.S. As of late, even for a huge system, there have been a disturbing number of surgical providers who have routinely harmed patients by committing serial mistakes and standard of care breaches. In certain of these cases, the VA took years to remove the physicians, during which time patients suffered repeated injuries due to shoddy and substandard surgical practices. In most of these cases, the offending surgeons violated the VA’s requirements of informed consent, a protective measure that is oftentimes overlooked when a Veteran seeks service connection for a medical error committed by a VA practitioner.Continue reading “VA Medical Centers Must Comply With Informed Consent Rules”
The VA healthcare system provides much-needed access to medical care for millions of Veterans each year. Although the majority of VA healthcare professionals are mission-focused and provide quality care to the Veterans they serve, the titanic size of the VA healthcare system permits negligent and sometimes even willful practitioners to repeatedly harm Veterans due to a lack of oversight and accountability at certain VA medical facilities. As demonstrated in the linked Washington Post article, incompetent and/or impaired practitioners not properly supervised or whose adverse events are not monitored in systematic fashion can harm or kill large numbers of patients at a single VA medical facility.
In 2018, we posted a blog entry addressing that, well over a decade past Hurricane Katrina, Veterans’ claims were still hampered by mistakes made by local VA offices in the months and years following the disaster. The prior post discussed that Louisiana Veterans who filed claims between 2005 and 2012, or those whose claims were in the evidentiary phase at the New Orleans Regional Office, faced myriad problems including unadjudicated claims, ratings mistakes, and failure to retain and consider medical records, examinations and lay statements, among other issues. 
A recent memorandum decision by Judge Hagel serves as a reminder to Veterans that forwarding a favorable disability finding by the Social Security Administration is no “slam dunk” for a finding of unemployability/TDIU. Veterans that submit SSA decision letters on their own miss the crucial opportunity to explain at the outset that while an SSA finding may reference several conditions that—in the aggregate—render the Veteran disabled; the Veteran’s service-connected conditions, even considered alone, render the Veteran unemployable. 
Veterans who are discharged under Conditions Other Than Honorable often face considerable difficulty earning VA Benefits. Veterans with such discharges will often receive medical care at a VA medical center, and may have a PTSD or other mental health diagnosis directly related to combat service. Those Veterans are oftentimes befuddled and frustrated when the VA denies their service connection claim despite the confirmed combat stressor and current PTSD diagnosis by a VA provider.