Safeguards against poor care for veterans – just not at VA hospitals
For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off.
Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate. It was a serious mistake, and under federal rules, regulators investigated.
But Dr. Kao, with their consent, made his mistake all but disappear. He simply rewrote his surgical plan to match the number of seeds in the prostate, investigators said.
The revision may have made Dr. Kao look better, but it did nothing for the patient, who had to undergo a second implant. It failed, too, resulting in an unintended dose to the rectum. Regulators knew nothing of this second mistake because no one reported it.
Two years later, in 2005, Dr. Kao rewrote another surgical plan after putting half the seeds in the wrong organ. Once again, regulators did not object.
Had the government responded more aggressively, it might have uncovered a rogue cancer unit at the hospital, one that operated with virtually no outside scrutiny and botched 92 of 116 cancer treatments over a span of more than six years — and then kept quiet about it, according to interviews with investigators, government officials and public records.
The team continued implants for a year even though the equipment that measured whether patients received the proper radiation dose was broken. The radiation safety committee at the Veterans Affairs hospital knew of this problem but took no action, records show.
There was a time when VA hospitals were among the best in the nation. I had friends and family who only survived their wartime injuries because of the dedicated care and concern of VA hospitals and staff.
We had one physician in the family who left private practice to spend most of his career in VA hospitals – to give back to the service that paid for his training and education. And I’ve participated in clinical trials for medication that proved to be a boon for the elderly – trials centered at our local VA hospital even though most of those in the trials were civilians.
Crap treatment for our vets – regardless of history’s judgement of the politics of American wars in the last half-century – is unforgivable. Please, someone nudge the chickenhawks in Congress into getting off their rusty dusties and doing something about preventing this meanness.
