Doctors and nurses at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are warning that the region’s military hospitals won’t be able to properly care for wounded troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan unless the Pentagon delays its plans to consolidate the hospitals this fall. The Defense Department plans to begin shutting down Walter Reed in August, transferring patients and staff from the District facility to the newly expanded military medical center in Bethesda and to a new community hospital at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
But not all operating rooms and patient services at Bethesda will be ready by the moving deadline established by law, Sept. 15, according to medical personnel who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Unless the Pentagon finds a way to delay the move, those employees said, they’ll be unable to provide care for all of Walter Reed’s wounded troops, veterans, and other injured soldiers returning from the wars.
Local government officials are already urging the Pentagon to delay moving more than 30,000 local defense personnel in the Washington area until road improvements can be made around the office and hospital sites to accommodate more daily commuters and avoid gridlock. But the new warnings from medical personnel add a sense of urgency to those efforts.
“My equipment could break down tomorrow, and that should be OK because we’re going to [Bethesda],” one Walter Reed nurse said. “But they’re not ready to handle my workload.”
Defense officials have recognized that space limitations at Bethesda are troubling. An independent panel found in 2009 that operating rooms at the new medical center wouldn’t be able to handle the current workload and meet the highest medical standards set by law.
Only 13 operating rooms at Bethesda are expected to be ready to receive wounded warriors by the time Walter Reed closes. Bethesda and Walter Reed now have 32 operating rooms combined.
Officials said some wounded troops could be sent to a new community hospital being built at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County — 10 operating rooms will be ready there by September — but that facility lacks the equipment needed to treat some battlefield injuries, the medical staffers said.
Bethesda will have 20 fully functional operating rooms by May 2012. Until then, officials said they’ll double up operating room use by working 12-hour shifts, a tactic they say will meet the military’s high standards but that Walter Reed medical personnel doubt will help.
“You’re just putting a dress on a pig in one sense, because there’s still no room,” another nurse said.
The Pentagon is required by law to move personnel by Sept. 15, but Congress is crafting legislation that would give the defense secretary the authority to delay some of the moves.
