For VA Whistleblowers, A Culture Of Fear And Retaliation
Alan Hyde is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System. He served in Operation Desert Storm, where he suffered an in-service leg injury. But it's his time with the Central Alabama VA, he says, that has left him more rattled, frustrated and angry.
"It's a toxic environment there," Hyde says. "And I feel sorry for the veterans."
Hyde is both a patient and a former employee at the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System (CAVHCS) in Montgomery. He supervised employees who took vets for treatment outside the VA. Hyde was fired after six months for unspecified misconduct. He is among dozens of people who say they faced vicious retaliation when they tried to improve conditions there or hold managers accountable.
More than 30 current and former VA employees spoke to NPR. They include doctors, nurses and administrators — many of them veterans themselves. All describe an entrenched management culture that uses fear and intimidation to prevent potential whistleblowers from talking.
"If you say anything about patient care and the problems, you're quickly labeled a troublemaker and attacked by a clique that just promotes itself. Your life becomes hell," one longtime employee at the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System or CAVHCS told NPR. Like many we interviewed there, she requested anonymity out of fear for her job.
The problems are especially acute at hospital complexes in Montgomery and Tuskegee, Ala., which are part of a regional network known as VA Southeast Network VISN 7. The VA divides veterans' health care into 21 geographic regions called VISNs.
Workers say the retaliatory tactics run the gamut from sophomoric (a shift manager pouring salt into a subordinate's coffee cup) to hard-to-fathom (isolation rooms used as psychological coercion) and more.
"There's no accountability," Hyde says. "And it's gonna be a never-ending cycle here until someone steps in and starts cleaning house from the top and putting people in who care about the veterans."
But neither those charged with federal oversight nor the VA itself has taken those steps, months or even years after the first complaints were reported.
VISN 7 leads the VA in the number of whistleblower complaints per veteran served. The VA itself leads all federal agencies in the number of whistleblowers who say they've been retaliated against — up to 40 percent annually, according to federal testimony. Two nonprofit groups that support whistleblowers say the number of retaliation cases they see from the VA is far higher.
In the case of Central Alabama, NPR's investigation found that senior leadership subjected employees who spoke up to similar patterns of punishment:
- Physical isolation and verbal abuse.
- Bullying in and outside
