VA staff engages in a practice called “scrubbing,” whereby medical workers convince veteran patients that they don’t need their scheduled appointments so that the patients cancel without seeing a doctor.
“When it comes time for their appointment, one of their colleagues will say you don’t need to see anyone because you just saw someone six months ago. So they get bumped another six months,” John P. Beavers, former nurse practitioner at Michigan’s Battle Creek VA Medical Center, told The Daily Caller. “Then they boot them out again. It happens continuously.”
“The person who answers the phone might not even be the person’s physician, but they’ll just pull up the person’s record and tell them they don’t need the appointment,” Beavers said. “But they won’t take them off the schedule until the day or next day. That makes it look like the patient canceled. It looks like they still have a full schedule but they’ve already scrubbed some of the appointments and if other patients call in they can’t give them that slot.”
“Scrubbing is the common term that the nurses called it, that the primary care team uses. They all know what that term is, and they still use it and they still continue to do it even after the whole Phoenix thing,” Beavers said, referring to the scandal surrounding preventable patient deaths at the Phoenix VA Medical Center, where secret paper waiting lists were kept for patients.
Beavers said that he witnessed “scrubbing” at the Battle Creek VA and that he believes the practice goes on elsewhere in the VA system.
“I worked there about 15 months, which was long enough for me to get pushed out by them,” Beavers said. “I’m a veteran so as soon as I got there and saw all the stuff they were doing I called them out. I was bringing patients back to see them again [for follow-up appointments]. I was told by a nurse that I COULD’NT do that. They didn’t like to be told that they were doing stuff inappropriately.”
Battle Creek VA Medical Center spokesman Damian McGee told TheDC that he couldn’t confirm the “scrubbing” practice.
“I have no information, I guess, in support of whatever claims you received,” McGee said, adding that “we were inspected like every other facility” in the aftermath of the Phoenix scandal. “I’m pretty sure it was the [Office of the Inspector General] who inspected everyone. It was across the VA.”
But Beavers said that the inspector general visited quietly without talking to him or many others.
“We had a meeting that said they were coming,” Beavers said. “People literally said, ‘Can we hide in our exam rooms and shut the door?’ I said, ‘They can talk to me.’ My wife was in the same unit. They could have talked to us. I don’t even know when they came. All I heard was that they came and went.”