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I did part of my training in the local VA, had a few dozen patients of mine that were covered by the VA, plus multiple uncles, a few aunts, my grandfather, and my father as well.
It can be a pain in the ass sometimes; they never have the full funding they should have, so it can take a while to get things done.
But, even back in the early nineties when I was there doing clinicals, it was overall a good place to interact with, with one exception, which I'll come back to.
It has been very rare for anyone I went there with to have providers of any level not do their best. The bureaucracy is where things can get annoying, but even there, it tends to work out. That's been consistent even when our closest one has to send a patient out to another facility for things they don't/can't do. It's actually hard to find much to complain about, and I'm never afraid to point out bullshit in the medical industry.
Now, back in the day was the one big exception.
This was in 92. I was a fucking punk kid, but I wanted to do something in the medical field with my life. Had since I was a little kid. A high school class I was taking would let you become a nurse's assistant if you stuck with it and passed with a high enough state test score (higher than what someone would have to get if they were one year older and went through a community college).
We'd go to pretty much every facility in three counties, getting basic hands on practice.
The VA, we'd rotate through departments every third day.
One department was dedicated to patients with AIDS. Now, back then it was still a death sentence, so I understood why people were scared. But the VA was treating the patients like shit. Outright neglect, which was definitely contributing to the speed at which people were dying.
Like I said, I get the fear. What I didn't accept was the bullshit of it. The nurses themselves pretending like the fear was an excuse for dereliction of duty. The ward was hard to staff, but it was voluntarily, and came with higher pay. So, no fucking excuse for not providing proper care; they could have opted out. And the administration was allowing it because they just wanted enough staff to keep up appearances, they did not give a fuck, in part because there was still the lingering idea that it was as "gay disease".
Obviously, not everyone involved thought that way, or I would never have heard about the behind the scenes part. But the nurses and doctors that were doing their job right were the minority, and working three times as hard just to cover the patients.
Fuck, there were twenty three of us in the class, and there were only three of us willing to do anything on the ward, one of whom's parents flipped out and stopped them.
It's also important to note that by then, it was clearly understood that following protocols would prevent any infection. The problem with that was the sharps protocol was disputed heavily by people that just refused to believe it. So it made people that didn't know the facts not know who to believe, nor where or how to get good facts. It was all a clusterfuck.
I'm still pissed about how those patients were treated. I did a second rotation through that ward because one of the nurses asked me to. We had hit it off. She ended up being my mentor and helped me out in a lot of ways. Fucking COVID killed her when she came out of retirement to help staff overload since she had icu experience.
That one experience originally had me soured on the VA. The rest of our VA was solid, but if the admins were willing to do that, I felt the whole thing was rotten. It took a few years before my opinion changed. Even then, it was longer before I stopped expecting the worst out of them.