VA secretary hopes to improve access, outreach to veterans

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VA secretary hopes to improve access, outreach to veterans
By Leo Shane III
Stars and Stripes
Published: August 1, 2010

WASHINGTON — Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki concedes that a full transformation to a user-friendly, fast-moving department is still years away, but he also insists that the focus and approach of VA workers has fundamentally changed in the last 18 months.

"Our primary focus has been access. We’ve wanted to outreach to all veterans who need us," Shinseki said in an interview with Stars and Stripes. "We know if we diagnose and treat (problems), people get better. If we don’t, there’s a good percentage of them who get worse."

Shinseki’s comments, before President Barack Obama’s remarks to the Disabled American Veterans Convention on Monday morning, come as the VA stares down a continuing wave of veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They enter a complex health and benefits system which boasts state-of-the-art record keeping for some programs but antiquated paper records in others.

Nearly 200,000 veterans have been waiting at least four months for benefits claims to be approved, a figure veterans groups have blasted as an embarrassment for the department.

Shinseki made trimming the backlog his top priority earlier this year but acknowledged that the problem will likely get worse in the coming year, as rules for claims on post-traumatic stress disorder and Agent-Orange-related illnesses were relaxed by department officials.