Nashville VA Hospital Promises Change During Contentious Town Hall Meeting

About 100 people attended the Nashville town hall meeting at the Veterans Affairs hospital. Many shared their personal experiences. Credit: Emily Siner / WPLN

For more than two hours Monday, veterans passed around a microphone at the Nashville VA hospital and gave director Juan Morales a litany of complaints. They talked about rude physicians, unexpected cancellations and lost paperwork.

Roger Morris, a 29-year-old Army veteran, said he was put in a hospital bed with blood on it — and had the pictures to prove it, he said — and then given the wrong medication.

“Wrong medications can kill somebody. Do understand this, sir?” he told Morales. “Why are we having to go through this? Simply, there’s no excuse for it.”

Many people also spoke about long waits for appointments. Misty Hollars, the daughter of an Army veteran, said her father had to wait six months for a CT scan. When he finally saw a specialist, she said, he was told that other doctors had diagnosed him incorrectly.

A veteran stands up to speak to Juan Morales, director of the Tennessee Valley Health System, which oversees Veterans Affairs hospitals in the region. Credit: Emily Siner / WPLN

“They’re back to base one,” Hollars said. “You wait for six to eight months to wait for a specialist who’s supposed to be able to help him. He can die in six to eight months.”

An internal audit by the national Department of Veterans Affairs in June found that veterans waited, on average, more than two months to see a doctor for the first time at the Nashville hospital.

Morales apologized to the audience and said things are changing, but slowly. The Tennessee Valley Health System, which oversees VA facilities in Middle Tennessee and parts of Southern Kentucky, has been approved to hire more than 300 employees, he said.

“I wish I could, next week, tell you guys we got all the staff on board,” he said. “But it takes time to recruit.”

The VA in this region has paid $16 million for veterans to see doctors outside the system, Morales said, and it’s reduced its electronic wait list by more than 3,000 patients — from 4,500 in June to 1,027 in September.