Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Another story in the news. The headline says "Department of Veterans Affairs employees destroyed veterans’ medical records to cancel backlogged exam requests"

While the headline may be accurate, it's incomplete. This story is only partly about the VA. Unmentioned in the article is the fact that the clinical parts of the VAMC are run largely by UCLA under contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs. In particular, the person who initiated the records destruction, according to the linked article, was Dr. Suzie El-Saden, who is an associate clinical professor in the UCLA Department of RadiologyAccording to the article, it was Dr. El-Saden who "initiated an 'ongoing discussion in the department' to cancel exam requests and destroy veterans’ medical files so that no record of the exam requests would exist" at the VA. 

It's that same University of California pattern that I've written about before: University of California supervisors demanding unethical and potentially criminal behavior from their subordinates.