Walter Reed – Scandal or Target of Opportunity?

Ever since the Washington Post story broke about wounded soldiers living in sub-standard housing and being caught in bureaucratic nightmares the left has been hammering President Bush about it. The articles created a wave of outrage in media outlets across the country and Democratic lawmakers all stepped up to the plate to take their swing at the administration with the end result being the firing of top Army personnel, such as the former commander of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, MD. But now that the rush to blame has subsided and reforms are under way at Walter Reed where are the lawmakers, were they really concerned about the troops or were they all using them as stage props, for their re-election campaign?

Walter Reed as a community hasn’t taken these accusations lightly and one of the problems outlined in the Post articles has already been addressed - the lack of sufficient case managers to manager the treatment and eventual discharge of our wounded warriors. Recently twenty-eight Army nurses from bases as far away as Alaska have been reassigned to Walter Reed in an effort to update and modernize the Case Management functions of the Warrior Transition Brigade. Acting Army Surgeon General and Chief of the Army Nurse Corp, Maj. Gen Gale Pollock, RN called for the case managers as part of a series of step designed to improve outpatient services at Walter Reed and to bring case management within the Wounded Warrior program up to industry standards.

With the arrival of these additional nurses the patient to nurse ratio for case managers is now 17 patient s to every case manager well below the industry standard of 30/35 to one. The Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade follows the patient during both their inpatient as well as their outpatient stays at Walter Reed and it is hoped that the continuity of care will continue once the patients leave the hospital.

Pollock believes that while the Post articles were damning, they also provided the push to get things moving in the system to affect change. As anyone who has ever dealt with or visited Walter Reed can attest, these problems have been there for decades and it was simply the weight of the bureaucracy that kept things the way they were.

In this case the Post did us a favor and forced the bureaucracy to change or be removed. As it was, some of the bureaucracy was removed and we can only be thankful that these problems that out lawmakers should have been addressing decades ago were brought into the light of day.