Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992 TAG: 9203060372
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I've represented VAs in all 50 states, and I have no knowledge of anyone doing anything like they're doing here," Jimmy Whitman said Thursday.
Whitman, who represents Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland for the American Federation of Government Employees, said the national union president is expected to ask Edward Derwinski, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, to intervene.
Whitman, a national vice president of the union, met Wednesday with 325 professional and non-professional VA employees to hear concerns. Local union officials and some employees have been complaining about what they have called a chaotic work environment that has resulted in poor patient care.
What Whitman heard troubled him: Complaints of hidden video cameras, allegations of tapped phones, and clinics being ordered to close at an appointed hour while veterans sit waiting for care.
The union at the Salem medical center is conducting an employee survey to gauge work conditions, patient care and morale. The union represents 600 of the center's nearly 1,000 non-supervisory and non-management employees, both professionals and non-professionals. The center employs a total of 1,300.
Results of that survey are to be released at a news conference this morning.
"Most of the problems seem to stem from when management officials made a change," Whitman said. "It's not the employees who have changed. It's management."
Management changes go back to 1989, with the appointment of Clark Graninger as director of the Salem VA medical center. Graninger, a career VA officer, had been director of the VA Medical Center in Albany, N.Y., before moving to Salem.
In 1990, Dr. Larry Edwards was appointed chief of staff at the Salem center. He previously was chief administrator for the Oral Roberts City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Oklahoma. He presided over the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine through most of its existence and headed many of its medical missions programs.
The City of Faith and the university medical school closed in 1989 out of financial necessity.
Some Salem VA employees charge that Graninger has relinquished control of the center to Edwards. Edwards has denied the charge, saying he, Graninger and Associate Director Laura Miller "work very well together and jointly make decisions."
But it is those decisions that employees claim have led to plummeting morale and deteriorating patient care.
One is the decision to give a competency test to all nursing personnel. Edwards has said that the test is linked to the move into a new $50 million facility next month and the resulting shifts in some employees' work assignments.
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations - which accredits 5,400 hospitals and 3,600 health care facilities in the United States, including the Salem VA medical center - requires a current assessment of competency, Edwards said.
"Some people don't like the word competency," Edwards said. "But what it boils down to is doing a current assessment of what people's professional skills are in taking care of patients.
"The reason for the timing of it is we're getting ready to move to a new building."
The test will detect any need for skills upgrading, Edwards said. And if an employee's skills are dated, "we'll get them updated so they can go on to the assignment they want."
Michael Scott, director of public relations for the accreditation organization in Illinois, says the commission requires that nursing personnel be competent and has set requirements to fulfill that competency.
"There are a lot of ways to assess competence, but we don't prescribe any given test or anything else," he said. "We leave things like that up to the institution."
But the union charges that Edwards is erroneously equating "assess" with "test."
"What we need is an ongoing education program," said Alma Lee, president of the union at the Salem center. "Why test people?"
For years, employees have had a mandatory review, Lee said. "Employees had accepted that. But [management] has decided it's not good enough," she said.
The union also charges that testing would allow management to dictate staff assignments rather than negotiate them with the union, as federal statutes require. Those statutes, outlined in the agreement between the VA and the union, stipulate that employees are guaranteed the right to participate in the implementation of personnel policies and practices relating to their conditions of employment.
No other VA medical center has done such a test, said Whitman, the regional union leader.
"We're trying to get this stopped," he said. "It's not only wrong but dehumanizing."
So far, management has turned down the union's request to halt testing. And Edwards argues that the union is wrong, that it cannot negotiate on the question of professional competence.
"But we do have the right to negotiate where employees are going to go," Lee said. "This is the first time we will not be able to negotiate how employees will be assigned."
The union is the exclusive representative for all employees who are eligible for union membership - whether they are members or not, Lee said.
by CNB