We’ve also brought aboard several key leaders with broad experience in business. Eleven of my 18 direct-reporting senior executives have joined VA since my swearing-in, and the entire leadership team is as committed as I am to making VA No. 1 in customer service.

We’re listening to veterans more, we’re listening to employees more, and together we are making lasting improvements at VA, so that in the future, veterans will say with pride, “That’s MyVA.”

But we need the continued support of Congress, veterans, VSOs, and the American people to make the necessary changes to keep moving forward.

 

Obviously, VA is an agency that is all about delivering services to a focused customer base. Given the huge and varied personnel base that the department needs to maintain to succeed in its mission, how are you doing at recruiting and hiring new personnel across the enterprise to replace those lost to attrition and retirement?

Last year, we launched a national recruiting initiative to bring medical professionals into VA that we need to provide veterans with the high-quality care they have earned through their service.

Since then, I have gone from coast to coast recruiting these medical professionals.

We’re stepping up recruiting new personnel. We’ve hired over 38,000 people in the past year for a net increase of 12,000 new VHA [Veterans Health Administration] employees, 1,000 more physicians, and over 2,700 more nurses.

Relationships with academic institutions are vital to the work we do at VA.

At VA, we have one of the most inspiring missions and the greatest clients of any health care system in the world.

There is no higher calling than caring for those who have served our nation in uniform.

We need the best doctors and nurses serving veterans – the best and brightest. That’s why [we are] looking into existing relationships and affiliations VA has with academic institutions and talking directly to medical professionals about joining us to fulfill our exceptional mission of caring for those who shall have borne the battle.

VA has three Nobel Laureates and seven winners of the Lasker Award. We are on the cutting edge of medicine.

VA pushed to increase pay for physicians and dentists coming to work at VA. This means an increase in pay of $20,000 to $35,000 annually for physicians and dentists who are providing care for veterans.

Thanks to the passage of the VA bill – the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act – the loan repayment program has been expanded for medical providers. This builds on our existing loan repayment and scholarship programs.

In order to recruit and retain the highest quality medical professionals, VA needs to be competitive with other health care systems. Ultimately, that is how we provide the best care to our veteran patients.

 

What is the current state across the enterprise of your various hospitals, centers, and support facilities in terms of being able to maintain the existing facilities base along with updating and building required new facilities?

On average, enrolled veterans rely on VA for only 34 percent of their care. But if that percentage rises just 1 percentage point, only 1 percentage point, from 34 to 35 percent, the cost increase to the VA, the need for an increase in budget, is $1.4 billion. The more veterans come to us for care, the harder it is for us to solve the access problems, to balance supply and demand without additional resources. That’s the fundamental problem, and it’s only made worse by our aging infrastructure. Nine hundred VA facilities are over 90 years old and 1,300 are over 70 years old. And if we didn’t close the facilities gap now, we could be facing another access crisis in 20 to 30 years.

 

The VA has had the reputation of delivering some of the highest quality, state-of-the-art medical services to its customer base of any medical system in the United States. What is the current level and quality of care you feel that your facilities and personnel are delivering at present, what are you planning to do to improve on that, and can you also tell us about the role VA researchers, scientists, doctors, and technologists have had in producing some of the most cutting-edge medical knowledge, devices, and treatments in the world?

One thing I’ve learned since my confirmation as secretary is there is no substitute for the VA.

Veterans need the VA, American medicine needs the VA, and Americans everywhere benefit from the VA.

But what’s so special about VA health care? Well, VA’s health care is supported by three pillars. It’s a unique system that depends on the strength inherent in all three of these pillars: research, education, and clinical care.

VA researchers have made major contributions to medical science, earning three Nobel Prizes, seven Lasker Awards, many other awards, and many other recognitions. Among those achievements are the first implantable cardiac pacemaker, the first successful liver transplant, the first nicotine patch to help smokers quit smoking, multiple advances in prosthetics, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, spinal cord research – spinal cord research that no one else in the country does – groundbreaking strides. We invented the shingles vaccine, and it was a VA nurse that came up with the idea of using a barcode to connect patients with medicine and medical records.