Amid National Pressure Over Wait Times, Nashville’s VA Deals With Leadership Vacancies

The health care system for veterans in Middle Tennessee is in a period of major transition: Right now, half the positions on its leadership team are vacant, although VA officials say they’re working steadily to change that.

Among the vacancies is the top job — system director — at the Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, which serves about 95,000 veterans in Tennessee and Kentucky. The most recent permanent director left last fall. As a temporary replacement, the system just brought in the director from the VA in Louisville — whose position is, in turn, temporarily filled by the associate director from Lexington.

“It’s like musical chairs,” says Suzanne Jené, Tennessee Valley’s deputy director. She had been filling in as director until recently; she now has one of the few permanent leadership positions in the system.

But hiring upper management at the VA is not a fast process, she says. 

“Executive level positions take months,” Jené says. “We’ll be lucky if we can have someone on board by the end of September — so almost a year [after the last director left], and that seems to be the norm within a lot of the VAs across the country.”

This drawn-out shakeup comes as the VA has been under pressure to reduce wait times for veterans nationwide. The Tennessee Valley system’s wait times are still above the national average. It has a long list of projects underway to address those, including building larger outpatient clinics around the region and hiring extra doctors and other staff.

As for the director position, the VA had posted the job a few times over the last year without success, says associate director Ronnie Smith.

“We couldn’t find the ideal candidate we were looking for and didn’t want to settle on someone,” he says.

But they have finally found a candidate they like, Jené says. The next step is getting that person vetted through the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management — another long process.

The health care system is also looking for three other executive-level hires: chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and assistant director. Jené says the goal is to fill them all in the next three to six months.