MSPB Forces VA To Take Back Fired Official

MSPB forces VA to take back fired official, VA exploring all options under new accountability authorities

On August 2, the Vice Chairman of the federal Merit Systems Protection Board ordered a stay of VA’s removal of the former director of the Washington, D.C. VA Medical Center.

MSPB’s stay order requires VA to return Brian Hawkins, fired on July 28, to work pending the Office of Special Counsel’s review of Hawkins’ claim that he was wrongly terminated.

VA has complied with the order and returned Hawkins to the payroll, but to an administrative position at the VA headquarters in Washington rather than to a patient-care position at the VA Medical Center.

“No judge who has never run a hospital and never cared for our nation’s Veterans will force me to put an employee back in a position when he allowed the facility to pose potential safety risks to our Veterans,” said VA Secretary Dr. David J. Shulkin. “Protecting our Veterans is my most important responsibility.”

The stay order came one day after the VA Office of Inspector General (VAOIG) issued a new report finding that Hawkins violated VA policy by sending sensitive VA information from his work email to unsecured private email accounts belonging to him and his wife.

VA will quickly make an assessment of Mr. Hawkins’ employment using the new evidence and armed with the new authorities recently provided by the VA Accountability Act signed into law by President Trump in June.

ACCORDING TO THE OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT

On March 21, 2017, a confidential complainant forwarded to the Office of Inspector General (OIG) documents describing equipment and supply issues at the Washington D.C. VA Medical Center (the Medical Center) sufficient to potentially compromise patient safety. OIG promptly reviewed the documentation.

On March 29, 2017, OIG deployed a Rapid Response Team to assess the allegations. OIG’s team conducted interviews, collected documents, and conducted a physical inspection of the Medical Center’s satellite storage areas on March 29–30, 2017. The team returned for an additional site visit on April 4–6, 2017, and is on-site for a third inspection at the time of this report’s publication.

OIG has preliminarily identified a number of serious and troubling deficiencies at the Medical Center that place patients at unnecessary risk. Although we have not identified at this time any adverse patient outcomes, we found that: there was no effective inventory system for managing the availability of medical equipment and supplies used for patient care;

• there was no effective system to ensure that supplies and equipment that were subject to patient safety recalls were not used on patients;
• 18 of the 25 sterile satellite storage areas for supplies were dirty;
• over $150 million in equipment or supplies had not been inventoried in the past year and therefore had not been accounted for;
• a large warehouse stocked full of non-inventoried equipment, materials and supplies has a lease expiring on April 30, 2017, with no effective plan to move the contents of the warehouse by that date; and
• there are numerous and critical open senior staff positions that will make prompt remediation of these issues very challenging.
• At least some of these issues have been known to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) senior management for some time without effective remediation.

The Medical Center Placed Patients at Unnecessary Risk

• Supply Shortages and Inventory Management Practices
• Assurance that Recalled Equipment and Supplies are Not Used on Patients
• Storage of Sterile Supplies
• The Medical Center’s Capital Asset Management Practices
• Medical Center Leadership Vacancies
• Logistics Department Vacancies
• Human Resources Department Vacancies

If you would like to read the entire report, you can do so here: https://www.va.gov/oig/pubs/VA OIG-17-02644-202.pdf