President Abraham Lincoln once said, “I am not concerned that you have fallen — I am concerned that you arise.”
Like any large organization, the Department of Veterans Affairs has seen its share of problems.
But under President Trump’s leadership, the VA is living up to Lincoln’s ideals by finding ways to fix those problems from past administrations.
When we realized our claim-appeals process was complex and inefficient, we worked with veterans service organizations, Congress, and the president to draft and pass a new law designed to fix it and put veterans first.
We launched a 24/7 White House VA hotline to help veterans cut through red tape and serve as an important feedback mechanism that lets agency leaders identify trends, spot problems more quickly, and drive improvements across the department.
And after Trump promised to give veterans more healthcare choices, we worked with Congress to do just that by passing the Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks, or MISSION, Act, which will consolidate our community care efforts into a single, simple-to-use program that puts veterans at the center of their healthcare decisions.
But perhaps the best example of VA’s continuous improvement on behalf of veterans is the progress we’ve made in expanding accessibility to, and quality of, the healthcare we deliver.
When it comes to access, a January study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that by 2017, VA had significantly shorter wait times for primary care, cardiology, and dermatology than private doctors. The study said the data it collected is “further supporting the finding that access to care has improved over time within the VA.”
That improvement came even as the VA was steadily seeing more patients.
In December, a Dartmouth study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that care at the VA was “significantly better” than the care found in non-VA facilities in 14 of 15 categories. “We found that VHA hospitals provided the best care in most referral regions and rarely provided the worst care,” the study found.
Our focus on customer service is part of the reason for these improvements. Our Veterans Experience Office is constantly assessing our performance and giving us the feedback we need to identify and resolve problems.
That office has been so successful that the Trump administration is using it as a model to develop customer service strategies across the entire government. This summer, lessons learned at the VA will be used to develop customer service plans at more than two dozen major federal agencies.
The cornerstone of our commitment to improving customer service is our willingness to acknowledge that things aren’t perfect and that change is a good thing. That’s the attitude we have as we prepare to undergo the biggest transition in our history: implementing the MISSION Act.
Under that law, which we’ll start implementing on June 6, our community care programs will be streamlined into a single program, and veterans will be able to more easily access outside care when necessary or when VA care is simply too far away.
This landmark change won’t supplant VA or cause the quality of its care to diminish. It will support our mission by improving its ability to get veterans the care they need when and where they need it.
This Memorial Day, I urge all Americans to remember the more than 1 million service members who gave their lives for our freedom in the several wars we’ve fought during the history of this country. At the VA, we are undergoing change at a rate that hasn’t been seen since the end of World War II to improve the lives of our living veterans.
We are welcoming these challenges as the best way to live up to the charge Lincoln laid on the nation after the Civil War — that we continue “to care for him who shall have borne the battle.”
Robert Wilkie (@SecWilkie) is the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
