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.