VA Nursing Leadership Silent on Veterans’ Wait Times Scandal

By Gail M. Pfeifer, MA, RN, AJN news director

Audie L. Murphy Veterans Administration Hospital in San Antonio, TX / Wikimedia Commons Audie L. Murphy Veterans Administration Hospital in San Antonio, TX / Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been trying to arrange an interview with a nurse in a leadership role at the VA’s Office of Nursing Services (ONS) for over a month now, with little success.

Granted, an excessive wait time for an interview pales in comparison with how long many veterans have had to wait for health care. Still, this has given me a tiny taste of what it must be like to enroll with the Veterans Health Administration for services: you can contact them, but you have to wait a really long time to even schedule a first appointment.

A substantive interview with AJN might have been a golden opportunity for the ONS to get out ahead of the story that has plagued the VA since the Phoenix scandal about lengthy waiting times at the VA broke in early May. (I did finally get a response of sorts. More on that below.)

To recap: The allegations in May that the Phoenix VA system had manipulated data about appointment wait times to hide the fact that veterans were not getting timely appointments galvanized public and Congressional […]