Report: Thousands of Homeless Vets Unable to Reach VA Call Center
Thousands of homeless veterans who tried to contact the Department of Veterans Affairs national call center to seek treatment or shelter had to resort to leaving messages on answering machines and many never received a referral or medical services.
That’s according to a report by an independent watchdog agency, The Washington Free Beacon reports.
The report, issued by the VA Inspector General (IG) found that more than 21,000 homeless veterans in fiscal year 2013 weren’t able to contact VA counselors and 3,000 were not referred to a VA medical facility, even when they provided all of the necessary information.
Rather than providing a human voice, the call center relied on answering machines instead of counselors, and the VA IG added that it “could not account for a significant amount of the counselors’ time,” the Beacon reports.
The report noted that counselors spent large amounts of time unavailable to answer calls during peak call times.
This resulted in 40,500 missed opportunities where the call center either didn’t refer the veterans’ calls to medical facilities, or it closed referrals without making certain that homeless veterans received the services they needed from VA medical facilities, Fox News reports.
“In our opinion, the majority of these calls could have been answered by counselors, instead of the answering machine,” the report stated. It also said that 85 percent of the records reviewed by the IG lacked documentation to show that the veterans had received the support services they needed, The Fiscal Times noted.
The report also found that counselors working at the center “often did not log in or did not spend the entire day logged into the call center telephone system.”
But the report is merely a drop in the bucket for what has been a terrible year for the VA, long mired in controversy after several other reports showed mistreatment of veterans including hidden wait lists at VA hospitals nationwide.
The influx of reports resulted in the resignation of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who started the Zero Homelessness Initiative in 2009. New VA Secretary Robert McDonald is following up with this, and the goal is to completely eliminate veteran homelessness by 2015, The Fiscal Times reports.
It’s estimated that on any given night, some 49,993 vets are homeless, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reports, according to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
About 12,700 veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn were homeless in 2010. The number of young homeless veterans is on the rise, although they only constitute 8.8 percent of the overall population of homeless vets.
The IG made several recommendations, including:
The Interim Under Secretary for Health should stop the use of answering machines and make counselors more useful and accessible to the National Call Center before hiring extra staff.
The IG recommended that the Under Secretary implement effective performance measures and criteria for the call center and performance measures for staff to improve the accessibility of counselors, efficient management of calls, as well as making certain that calls are referred properly.
The Under Secretary should monitor and analyze calls routinely to assess the quality of call center support services, including counselor accessibility, efficiency in answering calls, and the issuance of referrals.
The IG recommended the Under Secretary install management controls so that VA medical facilities receive feedback on the quality of referral responses and on necessary corrections and improvements to the support services being offered to homeless veterans.
This is a tall, but necessary order for the VA if homeless veterans are to be treated properly.
Tags: Veterans News
