Three Veterans Affairs health care workers who raised concerns about patient care told a House committee Tuesday that the agency has tried to retaliate against them, including one who received a pink slip 24 hours before her testimony to Congress.
Baltimore psychologist Minu Aghevli, who has worked for the VA for nearly 20 years, told lawmakers that she received a termination letter Monday from the VA Maryland Health Care Center, action that she called part of the agency’s “continuous retaliation” against her for reporting problems with manipulating patient wait lists.
“I feel like I’m being used as a threat against employees who may speak up about patient care concerns,” she said. “I don’t want to be a pawn.”
Another VA employee, Dr. Katherine Mitchell of Marion, Illinois, reported similar ongoing retaliation by the agency after she raised concerns about patient care. She was one of the whistleblowers who exposed phony wait lists at the Phoenix VA health care system in 2014.
“The retribution is vicious and disruptive to everyone,” she told lawmakers.
The hearing of the House Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations probed alleged failures of the Trump administration’s protections for whistleblowers, on the same morning that President Trump held a conference call with veterans about the success of his reforms at the VA.
VA Secretary Robert Wilkie criticized the committee in a letter for excluding department officials from the hearing. He noted that two of the witnesses “submitted their whistleblower complaints several years before the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection was established in 2017.”
“When the committee holds a hearing to air criticisms of the department while simultaneously preventing the department from participating to offer context and defend itself, the committee’s efforts risk appearing more like a political press conference than a hearing aimed at a balanced look at serious issues,” Mr. Wilkie wrote.
“If this is how the committee intends to conduct oversight of the department in the future, an exclusionary approach could chip away at the committee’s oft-stated goal of bipartisanship.”
Dr. Aghevli described being pressured to falsify patient wait lists, and having her clinical privileges revoked at an opioid treatment program after she raised concerns.
“In order to reduce the waitlist, I was instructed to improperly remove veterans from the electronic waitlist by scheduling fake appointments for them in an imaginary clinic,” she said in her prepared remarks. “This clinic was not tied to any provider or location, nor did it actually correspond to any real visits and accordingly. The veterans scheduled for these fictitious appointments were not actually receiving VA care.”
She said the VA “also pressured me to artificially reduce the number of patients on the waitlist through other improper means.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.