This year, the VA will invest $1.8 billion in over 2,200 research projects involving nearly 3,400 VA researchers. That research is what will help not just veterans, but American medicine, and a countless number of Americans who are not veterans.

We’re affiliated with many of the best medical schools and training programs in the country, over 1,800 educational institutions. This is a system that Omar Bradley set up in 1946-47 – it’s a great system. We train 120,000 health care professionals a year. That’s more than any other health care system in the United States – 62,000 medical students and residents, 23,000 nursing students, 33,000 students in other health care fields. We train an estimated 70 percent of all doctors in the United States, and we are the largest employer of nurses in the country. Who would do that work if there was no VA?

VA researchers continue to receive awards for excellence like the ones you see here. For example, 26 years ago, Dr. Bill Bauman was an endocrinologist at the Bronx VA [James J. Peters VA Medical Center] when he hired Ann Spungen, an applied physiologist, to help test the respiratory functions of paralyzed veterans. When Bauman shared his dream of learning how spinal cord injuries caused many parts of the body to function poorly, Spungen quit her job to join that research.

In 2001, they established the National Center of Excellence for the Medical Consequences of Spinal Cord Injuries, where they and others have worked to improve the quality of life for paralyzed veterans.

Since 2004, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has showed that veterans give VA health care higher ratings than patients at most private hospitals.

Last year it was my honor to give Drs. Bauman and Spungen the Samuel J. Heyman Service Award, which is an award given to the federal government employees who make the biggest difference in the lives of others.

 

What do you want to tell our readers about the Department of Veterans Affairs that we have not asked you in our previous questions?

We’ve got great people at the VA. One-third of our employees are veterans. We operate almost 1,600 sites of care, serving 9.1 million veterans. Last year we completed over 55 million appointments for 6.6 million unique patients of the 9.1 million veterans that are signed up for VA health care. We’re a national leader in telehealth services, caring for 700,000 veterans through over 2 million telehealth visits in the last fiscal year.

We’re also a national leader in reducing hospital infections, down 68.6 percent since 2007, compared to down only 30 percent for non-VA hospitals.

Since 2004, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has showed that veterans give VA health care higher ratings than patients at most private hospitals.

We’ve extended hours by 880,000 appointments that we complete in the evenings and the weekends, and we’re doing this in virtually all of our facilities, because we don’t want veterans waiting for care. We’ve activated 80 new buildings to add 1.3 million square feet to our health care footprint, plus another 420,000 square feet in VA-owned properties.

We’re providing regular updates of patient access data, so you can see how well we’re doing. No private health care system is doing this; no private health care system wants to be measured by appointment wait times. This is not an accepted industry practice, but we’re doing it. Here are the results: seven million more appointments completed by VA or through VA in the community in the past 12 months. Ninety-seven percent of appointments are now completed within 30 days of the veteran’s preferred date. Eighty-eight percent are within seven days. Twenty percent are same-day appointments.

Of course, health care is just one of nine VA lines of business. Other lines include life insurance, mortgage insurance, pensions, disability compensation, memorial affairs, and education. Now, we’ve got reasons to be proud in those areas, too. We guarantee two million home loans a year, with the lowest foreclosure rate and highest satisfaction rating in the mortgage industry. For the past decade, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has ranked our cemetery system as the top customer service organization in the nation, public or private. In the past two years, we’ve cut the disability claims backlog by about 80 percent. It peaked at 611,000 claims over 125 days in March of 2013; it’s now down to around 88,000 claims over 125 days. That’s the lowest it’s been in six years. And the average age of claims is already under our 125-day standard. How did we get there? Well, we fielded a new electronic system for handling claims. We hired more claims staff, and we’ve had them working mandatory overtime for much of the past four years.

We’ve also made a substantial dent in veterans’ homelessness, which has declined 33 percent from 2010 to 2014. Ending veterans’ homelessness is a local effort, and so we’re working with over 2,000 partners all over the country. Over 700 civic leaders have accepted the first lady’s and the president’s Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness by the end of this year.

We’ve got 550 mayors who have signed up, eight governors, 151 county and city officials, and everywhere I go I meet with these people to make sure we have the plans in place. No veteran should ever have a night spent without a roof over their head.

The budget the president put forward will increase access to medical care and benefits for veterans. It’ll address the infrastructure challenges, including major and minor construction, modernization, and renovation. It will fund medical and prosthetics research, and it will address our IT infrastructure and modernization.

All of this is why I’m here, that’s why our partners and employees are here, and that’s why we need to press forward in putting veterans first.

We are listening hard to what veterans, Congress, employees, and VSOs are telling us. What we hear drives us to a historic, department-wide transformation, changing VA’s culture and making veterans the center of everything we do.

We want every employee working to improve the work, with the focus on how to improve our care for our veterans, and how to be better stewards of taxpayer money.

There’s so much more I could tell you about the work that we’re doing, more that we’ve accomplished, and more that we will accomplish in the coming months.

VA has the greatest opportunity to enhance care for veterans in its history. We have an opportunity not only to right the wrongs, but to lengthen our lead in areas where we’ve always excelled, take the lead in service delivery areas that are lagging, and chart new ground in emerging or evolving areas of health care.

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

This interview first appeared in The Year in Veterans Affairs and Military Medicine: 2015-2016 Edition.