Your Call Is Important to Us – Tales from the VA Virtual Town Hall

To the absolute surprise of no one, the Veteran Virtual Town Hall was a shit show. In a turn of events that I could have predicted in my sleep, the VA Hospital for the Dallas area put on this tele-town hall, and it went off like a dumpster fire. This is what is called checking a corporate box.

How did it begin?

Yesterday, in the middle of the day, I received a random phone call from the North Texas VA Hospital. I was on the phone already talking to my bff, and I was like, I think I should take this. When I switched to the other call, it was an automated recording telling me that there was going to be a Town Hall meeting held by phone call. No date or time was given. When was this taking place? Who the fuck knows? The only instructions were that if I wanted to participate, all I had to do was answer the phone when they called again. Wow. Those are amazing instructions. This could take place literally anytime in the future.

The call disconnected, and I transferred back to the call with my bff. I told him that this super well-planned-out town hall was going to take place at some point in the future. When? I didn’t know because that was the one detail they failed to announce. I said that was highly irresponsible. It was almost like they were hoping no one would be available to actually participate or answer questions. Like, how did they expect interested parties to be available if they were in the middle of driving, or somewhere noisy, or at work? There was literally no forethought put into that announcement.

Almost like they were setting up the whole event for failure! What a shock.

What happened?

Well, not an hour ago, the phone rang. I was in the middle of eating a late lunch/early dinner while watching a movie. Underworld if you’d like to know, and the last fight scene was kicking off. Perfect time for my phone to ring with a call from guess who? The North TX VA Hospital! What a delight.

I answered the phone and the same automated voice let me know that I was about to get patched into the town hall meeting, and that if I wanted to participate, I could press 0 to ask my question. And then I was transferred over with the warning that I might be kept on the line at the end of the call for additional seconds, so I might want to be aware of that. Not ominous in the least.

The call began as all terribly planned corporate meetings. With no agenda, no clear direction or objective for the meeting. They went round the room on speaker phone and announced themselves. I could make out no one individual name; they were all garbled as were their equally pointless titles. The only one who spoke clearly enough for me to understand their title was the Public Affairs Officer. No surprise there.

Then the meeting kicks off. They first make the general announcement to be aware that you are on the line with 6000+ veterans, so don’t share any of your personal identifying details, like your social, or your birth date, etc. Good thing they announced that, because as anyone who has ever worked a phone line of any kind before, old people have no sense and will share all their information with anyone on the other end of the line if they think for half a second they will get some help, or listened to.

Again, there was no agenda, so we have no idea what is going to happen. Then a lady comes on, and she gives some schpiel about changes to women’s health at the Dallas VA. I would be excited, except that women’s health concerns through the VA have notoriously been in the Stone Ages, and I know better than to get excited for any changes at the Dallas VA because: 1) they suck ass, 2) their women’s health practitioners suck even more ass and hate women, so I’ll believe it when I see it. As far as I’m concerned, these “advancements” should have been made 20 years ago.

The last time I went to the VA was in 2015, and I never went back SPECIFICALLY because of the care I received at the women’s health clinic at the Dallas VA Hospital. I saw the dismissive notes they made about my health concerns after my visit. Oh yeah – that was a neat little feature they added to their healthy vet online portal. You could go in and read your doctor notes and visits. Which if the intention of that feature and the nature of the practitioner’s notes were to make sure I never went back, then mission accomplished. Because I did not, and have not gone back since.

But first, some announcements

The woman during this town hall goes on for about 5 minutes about the marvel that is being able to refer oneself to the OBGYN for women’s health concerns instead of having to wait an ice age to see the Primary Care doctor first, then wait another lifetime to be referred to the OBGYN, in the meantime, your woman parts are falling apart. Great. Next…

Then another woman comes on, this one was from the popular part of the hospital called “Community Care Center” where they basically lump anyone who would like to be given the proverbial run around to receive any kind of actual care. She goes on about something else, bizarrely enough, also related to women’s health. Specifically, any woman under 39 who was exposed to toxins during service.

But it was all white noise in my ears. The saddest thing was that while she was talking about something that should have applied to me, my brain was going – I am sure the male vets are loving all these women’s health-related announcements. Because that’s how I’ve been programmed to think, apparently. Extra aware of how much men hate hearing about women’s special needs, and any extra time spent to highlight this just piles onto the misogyny.

Time for our next caller

She eventually stopped, and then I think we got into the questions. Which were being fielded offline by other people who, I am sure, were culling through the hundreds, if not thousands, of requests to get through to ask their questions.

Interestingly enough, only four people managed to get through to ask their questions in the hour of this town hall. All were women, all were 70+, and only two were vets. The other two were spouses of vets and were calling, asking about their husbands’ medical problems.

All the questions had common themes:

1. It is impossible to get through to the VA to make an appointment and seek help
2. It is impossible to receive the care you need; it is more likely to be denied basic things like continuing the health care you were receiving while on active duty.
3. Women veterans are knowingly and routinely getting substandard care, way behind the times, and not in keeping with medical standards in the private sector.
4. The Community Care Center, of which you get assigned to a “specialist” to assist you with making appointments and getting referrals, never ever fucking ever calls you back. So you will go months, if not years, waiting to hear from them about things like eye appointments, dental appointments, surgery dates, etc.
5. There used to be an effective system for letting vets handle their own appointment setting online, and it went away nationally. Replaced by the system that is still in place today, which universally SUCKS (and I am speaking also from personal experience).

The few who got through grew increasingly angry as each call went on. The first one was told politely that her question needed more personal attention, so she was shuffled off the line, and then the next person came on, but it turned out her situation was more of the same. Questions about why she has been waiting over a year to get glasses and her tooth removed, and whether she should just keep calling? So she got shunted off the line too to be handled “personally for follow-up”.

The next one who came on was calm, as she explained her issue, and then her question came – how can she connect her recent cancer to the exposure she had received in the 80s due to where she had been stationed? And the room got quiet, as it became clear that she had a legit concern, but their real answer wanted to be: We’d prefer you didnt get it connected to your service because we don’t actually give a shit. She got shunted off.

Then the next lady who got on the line was a little more disgruntled. She had an actual question, and the doctors and administrators in the room were stumped. Because, yes, on paper they know the policy, but they legit could not answer her question as to why, despite the policy being quite clear, she was denied the continuance of her medications she had been taking during active duty? She has now spent time unmedicated. The officals in the room were dismissive and it was clear that they probably knew the answer was incompetence on behalf of whatever doctors she was seeing.

Which I get, because the mental health division at the North TX VA Hospital is a shit show. And she was from Collin county which is in North TX. I should know. I lived in the county for a short time. In any case, her question was also not answered, so she got shuttled off for more “personalized attention”. But she was salty by the time her call was over because she had caught them out and they were basically sweeping her and her question under the rug.

Too many questions

When the following lady got on the line, everything changed because she immediately called them out saying “The last lady that was on the call, you never answered her question. And for the benefit of everyone on the call, I think you should answer her question.” Good on her to try and call them out on their lies and subterfuge. But it didn’t work. They basically talked over her and interrupted her until she was forced to either ask another question or get booted off the call. So she asked another question, which she got the same “personal followup” answer. And that was the end of that.

At 53 minutes, they decided they didn’t have time for any more questions, but they assured everyone that if you still had a question, you could stay on the line and leave a voicemail. And they promised, every voicemail left would get a call back. I’ll be surprised if they do listen to these messages. I’d like to believe that they would, but I know better than to get my hopes up. I declined to waste my time and did not leave a voice message. But that also explained the cryptic warning at the start of the call about remaining on the line.

These kinds of town halls are an ineffective way of raising concerns. But they fulfill the kind of optics that the VA likes to use to lie to the vets it claims to serve. Just like they’re lying on their emails that trust in the VA is at an all-time high, with absolutely no connecting data to back up this statement. In light of the recent cuts to the VA and the restructuring with this administration, nothing that they say can be trusted.

The town hall was as I expected. A shit show dumpster fire of epic proportions that crashed and burned. I attended, I listened, I was underwhelmed.