1. Parking lot suicides are done for two reasons . Veterans do not want their loved ones to find their bodies and know the VA will dispose of them. The other reason is that it is the final FU to a government which is so full of bureaucracy it has rendered itself useless. However, in all fairness, this trend has extended itself to the civilian sector as well for quite some time where medical care is a form of Russian Roulette. Some are lucky to escape without harm, others end up damaged or dead. The word is collateral damage in medical care.
2. Dropping the ball in delivering medical care to veterans and civilians is becoming the norm. Health care workers are undulated with so much paper work for documentation and rules they have to follow as guidelines for the delivery of each aspect of care, they are utilizing the time they used to spend of patient care to document each and every move they make. If a time and motion study was implemented it would amaze people to know that more then 90 per cent of their time is spent documenting and covering their asses. If you are a VA patient, the time you spend with your provide is less than a few minutes because the rest of the the the provide is looking at the computer screen, charting.
3. The patient has been considered the “consumer” in the medical field for over 20 years, whereby in civilian sectors they are called consumers. The word alone indicates that the patient has been placed on the Back 40, because the definition of consumer is purchaser, buyer, customer, shopper and patron. This enforces everything we read and know about medical care, it is a profit making organization and nothing more. The VA is blatant about their desire to make profit at the cost of the veterans who rely on their care. There are more and more job descriptions placed on each healthcare worker, and when there is a hiring freeze, they delegate the empty slots between the health care workers left, to carry the load, which frustrates and stresses them out because of work overload. The VA figures their health care providers and workers can function doing the workload of those they did not replace. The workers who are left trying their best to do their jobs, end up leaving, or are so overworked, the ball in medical care is dropped. The bottom line: profit.
Inasmuch as the VA is trying to curtail the numbers of suicides of their veterans, the task is equivalent to the war on drugs. A waste of time and money because the war on drugs was lost a long time ago and cost the tax payers more money than the fight was worth. One can not prevent intentional suicide. Impossible. Each case is different and each person is different. What goes through the human mind when the person reaches the final stage of ending his/her life can not be controlled.
Cilla Mitchell aka Uzi Rafael
Wednesday, 21 March 2018
Parking lot suicides by veterans....................
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2 comments:
The consumer uses the services, the customer pays the bills. The difference is most obvious in large IT projects where the customer is perfectly willing to accept crappy service levels for the consumer/user if it cuts costs (and there is a VIP queue for the customer).
For government services, you can expect this effect to be even worse, as the primary focus of government is not even on providing service, but on staying in power (hence loyalty is valued over competency).
Cilla was incorrect about the VA system, and she knew better. She was just crotchety because the doctors at the Kerrville, Texas, VA facility would not provide her with morphine as fast as she wanted it. Diagnosed with treatable cancer of the throat, she rejected any treatment and demanded palliative care on her own terms. The VA medical staff did not think providing unlimited morphine to a woman who had had a heroin habit was a good idea. So she found some other friendly civilian doctors who weren't so bound by ethics and concern for the patient's life.
I had argued with her about her thesis, which is that the number of vet suicides on vet campuses are rocketing. She wrote this after two attempts at suicide on the grounds of the Kerrville hospital. The first incident-- last week -- an elderly man stopped by her car with his dog and asked if she wanted to pet him. She did, and went home. The second time, she realized there was an unfairness in making some government groundskeeper come across a corpse in the line of duty.
Instead, today she found a lovely, isolated site on the banks of the Llano River. She called me and we talked for an hour, her voice and mind becoming vaguer and weaker until I could hear nothing except the country ambiance through the phone, 1200 miles away. I spent the next two hours frantically dealing the the local police, and especially the VA suicide hotline. The people working for the VA were heroically persistent in locating her, tracing the cell tower pings from her phone: 30 degrees, 70', 4.16" North by 98 degrees, 95', 90,0: West. As she had planned, she was not found until the overdose of morphine was effective. In case the OD wasn't enough, she had washed the pills down with scotch, and had three loaded handguns ready.
If it were not for the VA and the Llano County Sheriff's office, her body might not have been found for days. My baby died today about 1:00 in the afternoon.
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