Shafted
I'm workin' two shifts, eatin' baloney.
Askin' myself, "Why didn't you just learn how to cook?"
--She Got the Gold Mine (I Got the Shaft),
Jerry Reed
A frog in a well shaft seeing the sky
--Chinese saying
Your highness, when I said that you are like
a stream of bat's piss,
I only mean that you shine out
like a shaft of gold when all around is dark
--Oscar Wilde, Monty Python's Flying Circus
________________
Does the largess of the Veterans Administration know no bounds?Askin' myself, "Why didn't you just learn how to cook?"
--She Got the Gold Mine (I Got the Shaft),
Jerry Reed
A frog in a well shaft seeing the sky
--Chinese saying
Your highness, when I said that you are like
a stream of bat's piss,
I only mean that you shine out
like a shaft of gold when all around is dark
--Oscar Wilde, Monty Python's Flying Circus
________________
Today's Miami Herald reported the VA will offer free care to vets who might have been infected in Miami hospital. Kind of a tough way to game the system.
Though a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs letter "pledges free medical care and treatment for former patients who have tested positive for HIV or hepatitis since being exposed to endoscopic cleaning mistakes at three VA hospitals, including one in Miami," some veterans advocates say they are promising nothing that the vets would not have already received. Instead, they are advocating for disability and damage remuneration.
It was discovered in December 2008 that some endoscopes used in colonoscopies performed at VA hospitals in Miami, Murfreesboro, TN, and Augusta, GA, were only rinsed, and not sanitized between uses.
"Investigators with the inspector general's office at the VA testified at Tuesday's subcommittee hearing that fewer than half the VA facilities using endoscopes had procedures posted for cleaning them as well as documents showing staff are trained in such procedures."
"After other VA sites were notified of the problem, 16 reported they weren't following guidelines for cleaning endoscopes" (Lawmakers Slam VA in Hearing).
The VA has been held up in the past as the poster child for streamlined medical care. The medical transgressions were often committed by contract personnel from teaching hospitals in the vicinity apparently unfamiliar with the equipment sanitation protocols.
These grave errors show that the system may not be the well-oiled machine it is made out to be.
Labels: contaminated endoscopes at VA hospitals, miami VA hospital offers infected veterans free care, poor protocols at VA hospitals
posted by Lisa at 3:40 PM
5 Comments:
Lisa, Correction- if it's a colon scope then it must be well oiled. Very small point.
jim
i have to introduce you to this blog for occasional dark chuckles.... fafblog
G.D.,
Thank you. FAFblog is wicked and well-written.
it is so typical, so often the government response to being caught in wrongdoing (and really folks, in what world can you claim that you weren't properly trained well enough to fucking know that you should wash and sterilize a piece of medical equipment that was just pulled out of someone's ass? i mean, really dudes) is to do exactly what they should have done in the first place.
sometimes this shit makes me dizzy.
I haven't had a colonoscopy, but I did have a VA sawbones tell me I had really good blood pressure for a guy who'd just had a prostate exam.
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