Are We There Yet? vol. 243
As I write this week, millions of people are participating in elections. I think it is appropriate that my topic is about government service and, specifically, about the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, commonly known as the VA. Last weekend, I was talking with a friend who works at the VA.
I didn’t know much more than very broad and general information about the VA and only that which I had read in the media. After our conversation, I was surprised by what I learned. I also did some digging on my own. According to an article published by the National Institute of Health (NIH), the VA is our nation’s largest integrated health care system. It provides health care at 1,380 health care facilities and serves 9.1 million enrolled veterans.
According to the article, “Clinical quality and safety of VA care were better than or equal to non-VA care in most studies. Patient experience in VA care was better than or equal to experience in non-VA care in all studies, but access and cost/efficiency outcomes were mixed.”
In fact, VA outperformed non-VA hospitals in the most recent Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems star ratings, with 79% of VA facilities receiving a summary star rating of 4 or 5 stars compared to 40% of non-VA hospitals, a performance that has been seen for 9 consecutive years.
VA provided more than 127.5 million health care appointments this past year, and VA’s data shows that veteran trust in that outpatient care sits at 92%, an enviable number for any health care system.
I suspect that most people would not think that a government-run health care system would have these results.
More shocking to me was that my friend explained that the VA is the largest educator of health care professionals in the U.S. and possibly in the world. The VA has partnerships with 90% of US medical schools. In fact, more than 70% of all U.S. practicing physicians trained at a VA facility at some point. Digging a bit deeper into the numbers, the VA partners with 1,500 institutions, including 186 medical schools, supporting more than 7,700 training programs in every U.S. state. That means the VA supports the training of more than 120,000 clinicians every year across a host of disciplines—nursing, social work, surgery, medicine, and the list goes on.
There has always been a lot of talk about government waste, and that budget needs to be cut. I think that with a little research, many people might change their opinions about what government agencies actually do for them. We should be thanking our government workers for what they do for us every day.
Take care and stay safe.
BOOK:
Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell
Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.
Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.
Learn more about Bob Len here.
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