VA withholds facts from Sen. Murray

SEATTLE – Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a senior member of the U.S. Senate committee that oversees the Department of Veterans Affairs. So it seems that officials at the agency might want to stop offending her.

First, when Murray got wind that a quality-control group had found problems with the psychiatric wards at the VA hospitals in Seattle and Tacoma, she sent a letter to the VA’s secretary, Jim Nicholson, and its undersecretary for health, Dr. Michael Kussman. The May 31 letter asked for several items, including a detailed explanation of the problems. She received no response for about two weeks.

Then, when she sat down with them to discuss the problems, they were reluctant to give her a copy of the inspectors’ report. The VA eventually turned one over the next day, as Murray flew back to Seattle to tour the VA hospital’s psychiatric ward here.

Next, Murray learned on Monday that her tour guides last Friday had neglected to mention an incident that had occurred the previous night, when a violent patient in the emergency room smashed a pane of safety glass, requiring a police response and a trip to Harborview Medical Center. That omission infuriated the senator – especially because she only learned about it when contacted by a Seattle Times reporter.

“To have found out second- or third-hand is deeply disappointing,” her spokeswoman, Alex Glass, said Tuesday. “She’s had a good relationship with the VA, and she wants to be an advocate for them, but she can’t do that unless they give her the full story.”

Murray scheduled a conference call for Wednesday to discuss the matter with two VA officials in Washington state, including Stan Johnson, director of the Seattle hospital.

Jeri Rowe, a spokeswoman for the VA in Seattle, was quick to issue a mea culpa on the hospital’s behalf.

“In hindsight should we have mentioned that? Yes, we should have,” Rowe said. “It was not our intention to not share it.”

During her tour, Murray asked VA officials whether there had been any recent suicide attempts at the hospital. The answer was a quick “no.”

The several VA officials present made no mention of the previous night’s incident because the patient was drunk, not suicidal, and because conditions in the emergency room weren’t a topic of the senator’s visit, Rowe said.

The patient sliced his arms on the glass and was bleeding badly, according to Steve McFadden, a laundry worker and union steward who had spoken with several witnesses.

Last fall, a patient committed suicide by hanging himself on a shower grab bar. As a result, an internal review team recommended removing such bars from the psychiatric wards.

But in May, when inspectors from the Chicago-based Joint Commission arrived, the grab bars were still in place. The inspectors issued a preliminary denial of accreditation, saying the hospital should have acted more quickly to remove the support bars as well as glass-paned cabinets for fire extinguishers and sharp-cornered metal picture frames.

The hospital remedied those problems and agreed that it should have done so sooner. Murray said the issue is especially important because of the numbers of soldiers returning from Iraq with mental health problems.

In response to Thursday’s incident, the hospital replaced the glass in the emergency room and in isolation units with a strong plastic-based material similar to Plexiglass, Rowe said.