A new report by the VA inspector general’s office reveals shortcomings at the San Diego VA in its efforts to combat the novel coronavirus, including a failure to screen all patients for virus symptoms, a shortage of nurses on staff, and a limited supply of masks and gowns to protect medical workers.
Out of 125 VA clinics across the U.S. that inspectors visited in mid-March, the report found that only four were not following guidelines to screen patients for symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Two of those clinics the San Diego VA runs.
Why this matters
Roughly 500,000 people have contracted the novel coronavirus around the world, including 100,000 in the U.S. and 400 in San Diego.
As the virus continues to spread, healthcare facilities are preparing as much as possible to keep medical staff healthy and slow the rate of transmission.
The report, released Thursday, assessed the preparedness of VA medical facilities across the country to tackle the surging coronavirus pandemic.
In early March, the VA asked its medical centers to begin using questionnaires to detect patients with COVID-19 symptoms before letting them inside any buildings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has encouraged these kinds of screenings, which serve as a chance to quickly identify and isolate COVID-19 patients in order to slow the spread of the virus.
Inspectors tested which VA facilities around the country had implemented the new guidelines by visiting VA clinics and hospitals unannounced between March 19 and March 24, without explaining who they were, and observing whether medical staff screened them for possible COVID-19 symptoms. They also surveyed officials at the healthcare centers about equipment and staffing needs.
While the San Diego VA hospital in La Jolla was properly screening people, the report said, two of its outpatient clinics weren’t.
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When inspectors visited a San Diego VA clinic in El Centro, “patients and visitors were permitted to freely enter the waiting room,” the report said, then “stood in the waiting room for 10 minutes, and were not greeted or screened by (VA) staff.”
At a mental health clinic in Chula Vista, the inspectors were “politely greeted but not asked any COVID-19 screening questions.”
The San Diego VA had not provided inewsource a comment by Saturday afternoon.
As of Friday, 571 patients at VA healthcare centers and 185 VA employees across the U.S. have tested positive for the coronavirus.
At the San Diego VA, five veterans have tested positive, according to a March 24 email sent to staff, and 12 patients in its ICU have tests pending. Another 126 patients are “under investigation” and waiting test results.
The email also said five staff at the San Diego Counseling Center tested positive, and all employees at the counseling center have been sent home to self-isolate.
Read more: See all of our coverage of the coronavirus outbreak and the response by local leaders and public health officials to the pandemic.
San Diego VA officials told the inspector general’s office that they currently don’t have enough nurses to “optimize care” in medical wards and ICUs. They also said their facilities need a bigger supply of disposable gowns, disinfecting wipes, hand sanitizer, N95 respirator masks and surgical masks.
VA spokeswoman Cindy Butler told inewsource on March 20 that the San Diego VA is “equipped with essential items and supplies to handle an influx of coronavirus cases,” and protect its healthcare workers. She also confirmed its facilities are following new CDC guidelines to restrict the use of highly protective respirator masks so they can maintain stockpile in case COVID-19 cases spike.
An email to VA medical staff on Feb. 28 obtained by inewsource encouraged healthcare workers to re-wear the same N95 mask when treating the same patient more than once and store them in “zip lock bags” in between uses, even though the standard policy is to discard them after they are worn.
More than a quarter million veterans in San Diego and Imperial counties are eligible to receive care from the San Diego VA healthcare system. During emergencies when other local hospitals become overwhelmed, the San Diego VA can also offer treatment to people in the region who are normally not eligible for VA care, stretching the system’s resources even thinner.
In a statement, Democratic Congressman Mike Levin said he was “troubled” by the inspector general’s findings about the San Diego VA.
“We must ensure that VA medical facilities are prepared to provide high quality care for our nation’s heroes,” he said.
Levin, whose district runs from Dana Point to La Jolla, is a member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs and its subcommittee on health. He said he is “in constant contact with our local VA medical facilities, and will continue to closely monitor their needs.”
A bill signed into law Friday by President Donald Trump offers $2 trillion of support to individuals and businesses to provide relief during the pandemic. That funding includes nearly $20 billion for the VA, which will help purchase more medical supplies, testing kits and protective gear, as well as build up bed capacity in VA hospitals and support homeless and elderly veterans in community living centers.
“We know that the magnitude of this public health emergency and the number of veterans sickened by this deadly virus are underreported,” said Rep. Mark Takano, chairman of the House VA committee, in a news release advocating for the bill’s passage.
“It will only become more severe in the weeks to come,” said Takano, a Riverside Democrat.
Do you have information that could further inewsource’s mission of holding officials and institutions accountable in the COVID-19 pandemic? Help make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues. Reach out at contact@inewsource.org.
Related:
- ‘Irresponsible’ mask restrictions endanger medical staff as COVID-19 spreads, workers say
- The struggle in San Diego to get COVID-19 safety gear for healthcare clinics
- County purchases 90,000 bandanas as fears of mask shortages escalate
- How the coronavirus might worsen California’s nurse shortage
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inewsource is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to improving lives in the San Diego region and beyond through impactful, data-based investigative and accountability journalism.
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Below is a breakdown of staffing data at inewsource. We determine the composition of our staff by asking them to self-identify. It is based on a newsroom of 11 and a total staff of 15 as of August 2020. Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns.
| All Staff Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns. | Newsroom Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | Business Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | |||
| Gender Identity | Gender Identity | Gender Identity | |||
| Women | 80% | Women | 82% | Women | 75% |
| Men | 20% | Men | 18% | Men | 25% |
| Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | |||
| Straight | 87% | Straight | 82% | Straight | 100% |
| LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | ||
| Not specified | 7% | Not specified | 7% | ||
| Speak a language beyond English at home | 33% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 18% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 75% |
| Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | |||
| White | 67% | White | 73% | White | 50% |
| Hispanic or Latinx | 20% | Two or more races | 18% | Hispanic or Latinx | 50% |
| Two or more races | 13% | Hispanic or Latinx | 9% | ||
| Age | Age | Age | |||
| 20-29 | 40% | 20-29 | 45% | 20-29 | 25% |
| 30-39 | 47% | 30-39 | 45% | 30-39 | 50% |
| 60 or older | 13% | 60 or older | 9% | 60 or older | 25% |
* The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.
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Transparency is one of our core values. Today, there is a need to build trust with our audience because new media and ways of communicating spread lies and slanted news faster than “real” news. At the same time, this era of new technologies makes it easier than ever for news organizations to be transparent. People don’t just have to believe us, they can investigate our investigations with our source materials.
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CEO, Editor and Founder: Lorie Hearn, loriehearn@inewsource.org
Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Managing Editor: Mark J. Rochester, markrochester@inewsource.org
Mark J. Rochester began as inewsource managing editor in April 2021, having served as editor in chief at Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Manhattan. He was previously senior news director for investigations at the Detroit Free Press. Both newsrooms, he notes, shared a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and their investigative journalism often received national recognition for exposing problems impacting communities of color.
His family looks forward to returning to California, having spent more than seven years in San Francisco where Rochester was a senior manager for the Associated Press. While with the news cooperative, he led computer-assisted reporting training efforts around the West, both inside and outside of AP, and conducted a widely used analysis of the $74 million in campaign contributions that went toward the California gay marriage ballot initiative in 2008. The AP analyzed who gave and why and then made the data available to member newspapers. The resulting series of stories based on the data was AP’s 2009 Pulitzer nomination for Local Reporting.
Rochester, who served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist in 2017, also has held senior leadership positions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Denver Post, Newsday and The Indianapolis Star. Rochester is vice president of Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc., the 6,000+ member international organization dedicated to improving investigative journalism. He also serves on the national advisory board of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, D.C.
Managing Editor: Laura Wingard, laurawingard@inewsource.org
Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
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