Army Pushing to Improve Care / Walter Reed-Type Woes Afflict Other U.S. Bases, Inspectors Find

The Army said yesterday that it was hiring case managers and boosting oversight at military facilities after an internal review concluded that poor outpatient care extended beyond Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said officials were completing a report on problems after a team of Army inspectors visited 11 bases in seven states last month to study outpatient treatment, building conditions and information provided to patients.

The investigation found staffing shortages, excessive paperwork and poor training that created too much bureaucracy and long waits, particularly at Fort Stewart in Georgia and Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas. No Virginia facilities were surveyed.

Army officials also were taking a special look at problems at Fort Lewis in Washington state.

Calling the delays unacceptable, Cody and Gen. Michael S. Tucker, a deputy commanding general at Walter Reed, said the Army was working hard to hire the personnel needed by June.

“What’s happening here at Walter Reed is a microcosm of things we need to address with our Army,” Cody said in a briefing with reporters at Walter Reed. “We are now moving to fix it across the Army.”

The Army’s comments came as a slew of task forces and congressional committees are looking to improve care after disclosures in February of shoddy outpatient treatment at Walter Reed, the Army’s premier center for treating soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department, which share responsibility for providing medical care to soldiers and veterans, to work more closely together and increase screenings for brain injury after a presidential task force concluded gaps existed.

“They shouldn’t have to come back here and fight a bureaucracy. That’s what we’re attacking,” Cody said. “It’s 40 years in the making. We have to change a bureaucracy and turbocharge it.”

At Walter Reed, patients in the dilapidated Building 18 have been moved to quarters where rooms have phones, plasma screen TVs and Internet access. Yesterday, Walter Reed also activated a “warrior transition brigade,” of mostly combat veterans who help guide soldiers from inpatient to outpatient treatment.

IMPACT

Army inspectors found health care mired in bureaucracy and crippled by staff shortages during a tour of 11 bases, and said the situation was most dire at Fort Stewart in Georgia and Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas.

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