House hearing returns focus to visible wounds - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

House hearing returns focus to visible wounds

After years of hearings and debates about the “invisible wounds of war” — the traumatic brain injuries and combat stress injuries inflicted in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones — lawmakers met Thursday to focus on the visible wounds of war, such as amputated limbs and spinal cord injuries.

Rep. Mike Michaud, D-Maine, chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s health panel, said these injuries often are overshadowed as the media, Congress and the Veterans Affairs Department have given a higher profile to head trauma and psychological injuries.

“I like that you highlighted that in this town, you don’t hear about the other injuries,” said Thomas Zampieri, director of government relations for the Blinded Veterans Association. He said he sees other issues that need to be addressed.

For example, while VA has hired 50 new blindness rehabilitation specialists, a promised Vision Center of Excellence keeps getting pushed back, said Thomas Zampieri, director of government relations for the Blinded Veterans Association.

“I’ve been chasing the ghosts of a timeline for a long time, and I’m still not sure” when the center will become reality, Zampieri said. “The Center of Excellence is an administrative center. It’s like 4,000 feet of office space.”

Registries to track service members with injuries that could ultimately lead to blindness also have not been created as mandated by Congress, Zampieri said.

After the Vietnam War, a study found that 50 percent of veterans who had penetrating eye injuries went blind 10 years later, but there’s no registry for this war to track such injuries. “Someone should be worried about that,” he said.

Denise Williams, assistant director for health policy for The American Legion, said both staff members and vets said VA polytrauma centers were short-staff when Legion members visited.

Carl Blake, national legislative director for Paralyzed Veterans of America, said he’s concerned that paralyzed service members are going to private facilities or community nursing homes straight from the military, rather than to VA facilities. This, he said, violates an agreement between the Defense Department and VA dating from January 2007 requiring that the VA facility closest to a veteran’s home be contacted first.

“Some of these men and women have received sub-optimal rehabilitation and some are being discharged without proper equipment,” Blake said. “Ensuring these men and women gain quick access to VA care in spinal-cord injury centers is critically important because it begins what will become a lifelong treatment process.”

But VA facilities are facing a nursing shortage, Blake noted. “As a result, VA is experiencing delays in admissions and bed reductions at its [spinal-cord injury] centers,” Blake said. He asked for more funding and a specialty pay provision for nurses to make their salaries competitive with civilian centers.

Tom Tarantino, legislative associate for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said that while IAVA members praise the care they receive at VA, they don’t always seek it. They complained of long waits, long drives and a lack of trust — especially after hearing about other veterans infected with HIV and hepatitis due to faulty equipment sterilization procedures.

“The VA and VA health has a massive public relations problem,” he said.

Joy Ilem, deputy national legislative director for Disabled American Veterans, said her organization had heard that veterans leaving the Defense Department’s high-tech prosthetics shops could not get comparable equipment — or maintenance — at VA facilities in the early years of the wars, although she said VA has made solid improvements in that area in recent years.

All of the veterans advocates said the root of many problems in VA’s health arena can be traced to miscommunications — that information is not being exchanged between VA and the Defense Department, veterans groups and individual service members and veterans.

VA and Defense Department officials read prepared testimony that spoke to their efforts to improve health care for veterans — while acknowledging staffing shortages — but they were unable to testify further in the usual question-and-answer session because lawmakers had to end the hearing so they could take part in House floor votes.