Days before a news organization planned to release a thorough investigative report into misconduct at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, the VA preempted the story by announcing its own internal investigation into the facility.
Scripps News’ Washington Bureau and WCPO had spent four months looking into a pattern of mismanagement and substandard patient care at the Cincinnati VA hospital for a scathing report published Tuesday evening. The report was based on interviews with 34 current and former officials who detailed the failures of the taxpayer-funded hospital.
But news of misconduct at the facility did not come as a complete surprise because the VA had announced late Friday that both the agency and its inspector generalplanned to launch investigations into problems with the Cincinnati hospital.
“Reports about the Cincinnati investigation began circulating on Capitol Hill after what sources described as ‘cryptic’ phone calls at about 5 p.m. to congressional offices, advising them of a formal inquiry from the inspector general’s office,” read a Fox News report on the VA probe made public Friday.
The VA soon announced it had shifted oversight of the Cincinnati hospital to Pittsburgh to avoid a conflict of interest as Jack Hetrick, the agency’s regional director, was under investigation for unspecified misconduct.
Hetrick was at the center of the Scripps story published Tuesday, which found potential impropriety involving his wife and the hospital’s chief of staff.
For example, Dr. Barbara Temeck, acting chief of staff to the facility since 2013, wrote prescriptions for drugs that included hyrdocodone and a form of Valium to Hetrick’s wife, despite the fact that Temeck did not have a license to write these controlled substance prescriptions. She also used an Illinois address to write the prescriptions while actually working at a VA hospital in South Carolina.
Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief of Scripps, said she and her reporters did not feel the VA announced its investigation in an attempt to overshadow their story. Weiss said she was pleased with the fact that the VA took the allegations made by whistleblowers seriously after reporters presented the agency with their findings by not only opening its own investigation, but asking the inspector general to look into the problems as well.
A VA spokesman told the Washington Examiner that “investigations immediately began upon being made aware of this issue.”
However, the Scripps report noted workers had sent VA Secretary Robert McDonald a letter back in September describing problems at the Cincinnati hospital in an effort to turn the agency’s attention to the facility.
Dozens of current and former staff members at the Cincinnati VA hospital told Scripps reporters that conditions at the facility had deteriorated after officials moved to cut costs.
A former surgeon told Scripps that Temeck had slashed the orthopedic staff shortly upon her arrival at the hospital in order to save money. However, the report found Temeck herself earned a generous surgeons’ salary on top of her chief of staff’s pay despite never performing a single surgery at the Cincinnati hospital.
“As acting chief of staff, Dr. Temeck earns $137,191. According to the VA, Temeck earns an additional $194,343 for her role as a cardiothoracic surgeon, for a total of $331,534,” the report said. “Multiple sources, including those who have been inside the operating room with Dr. Temeck, say she only serves as an assistant and has never worked as the operating surgeon since arriving in Cincinnati.”
Temeck reportedly implemented dangerous cost-cutting policies that put veterans’ lives at risk. For example, she required surgeons who complained of dirty medical tools to physically show her the contaminated instruments before requesting new ones, after medical staff began raising alarms that their tools frequently had “pieces of debris, possibly bone or other debris from previous surgeries still on the instrumentation.”
The policy forced surgeons to wait on Temeck to arrive to their operating rooms to inspect the dirty medical tools, occasionally while their patients were cut open and under anesthesia, for as long as a half hour. Infections spiked under Temeck’s leadership.
