VA secretary promises extra $5.2M for El Paso facility

U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke said the federal government is wasting money by pouring cash into El Paso’s Veterans Affairs facility — if top local officials aren’t held accountable for having some of the longest wait times in the country.

Interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson visited El Paso on Friday and promised to increase funding to El Paso’s VA facility by about $5.2 million. It’s part of the $17.6 billion in additional resources he’s requested requested over the next three years to hire enough doctors and nurses to speed up wait times and prevent future wait-time reporting scandals.

“You cannot have one of the poorest-performing VAs in the country here in El Paso, for as long as we have been such a problematic VA, and there not be consequences,” said O’Rourke (D-El Paso).

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Thursday released wait-time data as of July 1 for 141 VA facilities across the country. At the El Paso facility, new prospective specialty-care patients booking an appointment could expect to wait nearly 72 days — the fifth-worst wait time in the U.S. Established prospective mental-health patients wait an average of almost 14 days for an appointment — the second-longest wait in the country. New specialty-care patients that were actually seen in the month of May waited about 38 days — also second-worst in the U.S.

“Someone must take responsibility for this,” O-Rourke said. “There must be accountability, and there must be changes made, or else we can pour millions more into this facility, and we’ll still have the same problem year after year.”

“I believe where we’re headed is toward a process of gauging the timeliness of access to care that relies very heavily on patient-satisfaction feedback,” Gibson said.

O’Rourke paid special attention to the roughly 22 veterans who commit suicide every day in the U.S. and said he plans to begin personally recruiting mental-health professionals to the Borderland.

“Whether that means ultimately a full-service veterans hospital, whether that means additional resources to hire more providers, whether that means that there are consequences for leadership here at the VA today — whatever that means, we are expecting results,” O’Rourke said. “The secretary knows that.”

The El Paso VA has a hotline for making appointments. Dial 915-564-6143 between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

“I believe that in as little as two years, the conversation can dramatically change,” Gibson said. “If we seize this opportunity, people can be looking at VA and saying, ‘Do you remember what people were saying about that organization back in 2014? And look at what they’re doing now.'”