The tragedy playing out at many VA medical centers has no simple answers, but solutions are possible. The best solution is the community.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has not evolved rapidly enough to maintain pace with advances in military medicine and unfunded government mandates. It is unable — by its very design — to collaborate with the vast and varied array of resources available at the community level.
However, the VA is not singularly culpable. Successfully operating a service industry for millions of beneficiaries is impossible with tenuous year-to-year budgets, conflicting oversight and regulation by the administration, Congress and the states, and with a clutch of veterans service organizations vying for their paying constituency. This is a set-up for failure.
Veterans need a community advocate that links them to government and non-government services at the local, state and national levels. This effort must be from the bottom up and supported by Veterans Affairs through grant programs and improved collaborations. Current examples of these programs can be found in Tacoma, Wash., Fort Walton Beach, Fla., Huntsville, Ala., and Augusta.
We must empower communities to directly assist all their military and veterans and their families. This VA scandal would not have occurred had the communities been fully engaged.
In May, the Washington Post noted Veterans Affairs cares for only 42.2 percent of roughly 21.2 million veterans. Those who are not known by the department either don’t know they’re eligible for VA services, or do not know how to navigate one of our largest government bureaucracies.
This is the point at which the VA cannot be expected to succeed without the local community. The task that falls to community programs, then, is to proactively seek out and engage those who have served to assess current needs and prepare for future needs.
Including civilian health care resources for veterans makes sense in areas such as continuity of care, family support systems and access to care. Just as service is local, health care is local. Ideally, Veterans Affairs would pivot its focus to collaborating with community medical facilities and providing veteran-specific training to civilian staff to ensure special needs are met.
This change of culture is revolutionary, but it can turn Veterans Affairs into the most self-actualized organization within the federal government. The idea that only the VA can support veterans must be abandoned and replaced with the ethos that through community collaboration, veterans and their families can be known and supported for life. Veterans’ services must become woven into the fabric of the community — part of the collective services, not a service in itself.
Jim Lorraine is the president and CEO of AWP Community Integration, a national nonprofit headquartered in Augusta that works to establish community agencies throughout the country advocating for military and veterans.
—
About the Author
Featured
