Jeepnik said:
Years later I met a young woman who worked in the counseling unit there. Katsura invited me to visit. The change was astounding. The VA still has problems (mostly caused by underfunding) but the folks who work there today are a world apart from those forty years ago.
I may have met the young lady of which you speak. But in case I haven't, give her a very large thanks from me.
Hi,
Jeepnik, I'll be 64 here pretty soon, so I "knew of" the Long Beach VA around the time you had your first experience, and I hate to say it, but what you ran into sounds pretty much like the stories I heard then... a girlfriend at the time was an RN at Long Beach Memorial, and related a few of the many she'd heard thru the grapevine, too. I had no personal experiences, though.
My friend who's there now has been on staff close to 25 years--these days she's involved with internship programs, such as screening interns who will come work there--and says there have been SOME pretty major changes, for the better, just in that time. She jokes that the apocryphal gubb'mint employee who sleeps all day doesn't work for her! There's still a lot to be done, though. And that chronic underfunding is not helped by government inefficiency and numbskulls running much of the show. For an example, she tells of the huge new emergency facility they built just a couple of years back, with a $1bil plus price tag, that sits empty.
Apparently, the way she tells me, there's some kind of regulation on the distances and times to travel between the actual ER and certain services, such as radiology and surgery, that are integral to emergency treatment. I dunno who's reg that is, but it seems someone forgot to do their measuring, and the new building misses those specs. So they can't use it for its original purpose, and it sits unused cuz nobody's yet figured how to "repurpose" it. And, of course, even if they did, then they'd have to beg for the money to undo the mistake. Good luck with that? Meantime, guys are still sitting outside the old facility waiting for help...
At the other end of the spectrum is our local VA facility in Loma Linda/San Bernardino. A buddy goes there and gives it generally high marks, as do others I've known who've used it. Of course, that whole facility was little but an orange grove 30 years ago, so maybe it was built about the same time things started getting better all over?
Rick C
She sleepeth as I type this.
