VA Health Care

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) runs one of the nation's largest health care systems. In fiscal year 2000, roughly four million patients made 39 million outpatient visits to more than 700 VA health care facilities nationwide. However, excessive waiting times for outpatient care have been a long-standing problem. To ensure timely access to care, VA established a goal that all nonurgent primary and specialty care appointments be scheduled within 30 days of request and that clinics meet this goal by 1998. Yet, three years later, reports of long waiting times persist. Waiting times at the clinics in the 10 medical centers GAO visited indicate that meeting VA's 30-day standard is a continuing challenge for many clinics. Although most of the primary care clinics GAO visited (15 of 17) reported meeting VA's standard for nonurgent, outpatient appointments, only one-third of the specialty care clinics visited (18 of 54) met VA's 30-day standard. For the remaining two-thirds, waiting times ranged from 33 days at one urology clinic to 282 days at an optometry clinic. Although two-thirds of the specialty clinics GAO visited continued to have long waiting times, some were making progress in reducing waiting times, primarily by improving their scheduling processes and making better use of their staff. These successes were often the result of medical centers' and clinics' working with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)--a private contractor VA retained in July 1999--to develop strategies to reduce patient waiting times. Medical centers and clinics participating in VA's IHI project have received valuable information and strategies for successfully reducing waiting times. However, VA has not provided guidance to its medical centers on how to implement IHI strategies, and VA has only recently contracted with IHI to disseminate best practices agency-wide. VA has not developed other national guidance to help clinics reduce waiting times. Although clinics that did not have guidelines could have benefited from headquarters' assistance, VA has not established a national set of referral guidelines. Moreover, VA lacks an analytic framework for its medical centers and clinics to use in determining the root causes of lengthy waits.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone: