VA Pittsburgh holds town hall session for vets in Hopwood
Don Coleman of Lemont Furnace asks a list of questions for himself and friends of his at a town hall meeting held by the VA at Amvets in Hopwood Wednesday night where veterans could ask questions and air grievances about their VA healthcare experiences.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Huey Mogilles of Hopwood listens to an answer to a question he asked about an ongoing case he has with Veterans Affairs. The VA held a meeting Wednesday night at the Hopwood Amvets as part of an outreach program trying to connect with the veterans in its coverage area.
Karin McGraw, medical center director of the Pittsburgh VA Healthcare system, opened up the floor of Amvets Post 103 in Hopwood to questions. The VA held a town hall meeting for veterans to asks questions about their health care on Wednesday night.
Several dozen local veterans packed into Amvets Post 103 to give feedback and get answers about the quality of their care in a town hall hosted by the Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System Wednesday night.
The gathering was the first in a series of town hall sessions occurring in communities served by VA Pittsburgh, and experts from the Veterans Health and Benefits Administrations were on hand to accordingly address veterans’ healthcare and benefits concerns on an individual basis.
More than a dozen veterans stepped up to a microphone to air grievances or extend compliments on VA Pittsburgh’s service, and Karin McGraw, medical center director of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, stood directly in front of them with her own microphone to address their concerns. Jennifer Vandermolen, director of the VA Pittsburgh Regional Office, also answered several questions.
Several veterans said they had opted for coverage in the VA healthcare system in Clarksburg, W.Va., due to a variety of issues with the Pittsburgh system, including rudeness from clerical staff.
One veteran said that the way he and fellow veterans were treated in the Pittsburgh system had caused them to go to Clarksburg for service, adding that he estimated that half of the veterans in the room depend on their wives to take care of them, and that they don’t want any part of the VA anymore because of its quality of service.
McGraw, who became medical center director of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System 11 months ago, said to multiple veterans during the town hall session that she didn’t find the issues veterans reported with clerical staff acceptable.
After the town hall session, McGraw told the Herald-Standard that she was not previously aware of a contingent of local veterans switching to the Clarksburg system for coverage but added that that some veterans in the Clarksburg system had also come to the Pittsburgh system.
“Veterans have to go where they feel most comfortable with their care,” McGraw said. “Some of the instances and experiences they brought up I find unacceptable, and I definitely will look into it and address it because our veterans have to be treated with respect and dignity all the time. I don’t accept anything less than that.”
McGraw added that veterans also decide to change facilities because they like one system’s physician better or moved nearer to a certain facility.
The town hall session also yielded several positive comments from veterans on the quality of their care, including what they said was a high quality of treatment from both medical and clerical staff. Other veterans complained about benefits appeals processes that have been in limbo for several years.
The veterans who spoke up about the quality of their care demonstrated the severity of their medical situations. One veteran said he had suffered from service-related kidney cancer, another had neuropathy so severe that it doesn’t allow him to sleep at night, and a third had his left knee blown out during a combat assault. Several complained of service-related hypertension.
The town hall session marked the first “On the Move” gathering the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System has held, and McGraw said the first session was held in Fayette County because of the high number of veterans from Fayette that would travel to the system’s University Drive and H.J. Heinz campuses in Pittsburgh.
“They said, ‘Why don’t you come to our area?'” McGraw said. “And they were pretty vocal about it.”
VA Pittsburgh will hold similar sessions in Westmoreland County on April 4, Beaver County on May 16, and Washington County on July 12, and McGraw said that town hall sessions will be held annually in each of the six counties that VA Pittsburgh serves.
McGraw said turnout at Wednesday night’s town hall session was substantially higher than similar town halls she held within the region served by the Beckley, W.Va. VA, where she was director prior to taking over the Pittsburgh system.
According to a 2014 report by the Appalachian Regional Commission, Fayette County is one of 93 counties out of 207 in Appalachia (ranging from eastern Mississippi to upstate New York) whose portion of senior citizens who are veterans exceeds 25 percent.
Fayette County’s Community-Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC) for veterans is located on Pittsburgh Road in North Union Township.