March 29, 2024

Veterans Affairs scandal stems from a crisis of ethics: bioethicist

The crisis in the the US Veterans Affairs Department is fundamentally a crisis of ethics, according to the former hospital ethicist at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

The crisis in the the US Veterans Affairs Department is fundamentally a crisis of ethics, according to the former hospital ethicist at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Evelyne Shuster.

The VA’s director, Eric Shinseki, was forced to resign after it was discovered that employees were generating fraudulent statistics to improve their performance reports. The problem was particularly acute in Phoenix.

The New York Times decried “poor management, a history of retaliation toward employees, cumbersome and outdated technology, and a shortage of doctors and nurses and physical space to treat patients.” The Wall Street Journal lamented a “corrosive culture” which had damaged patient care.

But not long ago, VA was at the forefront of quality care and patient safety. It had identified weaknesses in its ethical culture and had set up a multi-million dollar program to deal with it called Integrated Ethics. How did things go so wrong?

The fundamental reason, Shuster writes in Bioethics Forum, a blog at The Hastings Center, is that ethics was an also-ran behind statistics and key performance indicators:

“Ironically, the very programs that made it possible for the VA to outpace other health care institutions in quality care, efficiency, and accountability also seem to have contributed to ethics failure in actual performance. The VA’s focus on quantifiable performance measures and accountability took a life of its own and helped foster the creation of a culture where ethics, integrity, and responsibility were simply overlooked or perceived as an impediment to achieving quality care.”

The Integrated Ethics program was supposed to promote ethical behaviour. Instead, she says, it “quickly became overwhelmed by a vast and rigid organization that valued documentation over action and reduced ethics to compliance and risk management. As a result, ethics in the VA became bureaucratized, an exercise of filling out forms and managerial compliance.” 

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