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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > April > 29
Friday, April 29, 2011
Editorial: VA wrong that critics will go away
There’s a pattern in the way the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is responding to the debacle at the VA dental clinic in Dayton.
Critics — in Congress and some reviewers of VA practices — believe they’re being stonewalled. The right people aren’t available to be interviewed or to testify; people who have direct knowledge of important facts have taken retirement or have been moved to other positions; the VA has redacted so much from documents that it’s impossible to make judgments about where responsibility really rests.
If you were cynical, you might think that VA officials are hoping that if hostile questions go unanswered long enough, that will end the matter.
If that’s the strategy, whoever hatched it needs to think again.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and Congressman Mike Turner have become more, not less, interested because they think they’re getting the runaround. Sen. Brown held a hearing Tuesday, questioning how a dentist could, for almost two decades, violate the most basic infection-control measures — not changing his gloves between patients, reusing equipment that hadn’t been sterilized.
Two of his patients have tested positive for hepatitis B, and a third has tested positive for hepatitis C, which may or may not have been acquired at the dental clinic. (Determining how the diseases were acquired may not be possible.)
On Thursday, April 21, a task force of local hospital and medical personnel put out its interim review of the situation. More than a dozen times in the 15-page evaluation of the VA’s investigation into Dr. Dwight Pemberton’s work, the group said it “agrees with the conclusion based on the limited and redacted information provided by the Dayton VA.”
Twice the committee said it had too little information to make a judgment.
It also disagreed with major decisions by the VA, including limiting notification and testing to just certain patients of Dr. Pemberton.
The message wasn’t subtle: The VA isn’t telling us what we need to know to understand the problems and risks. And based on what we do know, we don’t believe the VA is being aggressive enough.
In recommending much more testing of patients, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association is asking for no small thing. Giving blood tests to patients is not hugely expensive. The costly part is going through old files and tracking down so many individuals.
Dr. Pemberton saw 3,241 patients since 1992 and an unknown number between 1975 and 1991. The VA has contacted 535 people, restricting its notification only to people who had invasive procedures.
The criticism of that approach is that all dental procedures are at some level invasive.
Next week, there will be yet another congressional hearing, It’s being billed as “Sacred Obligation: Restoring Veteran Trust and Patient Safety.” That name tells you all you need to know if you’re a VA official.
What critics want is accountability. Who let this happen? Where are those individuals now? Why did it happen? Who knew what and when? Who didn’t act?
The goal is not just ensuring that heads roll. The goal is to make sure that something so repeated, so potentially harmful, so avoidable and so reckless never happens again.
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