Rep. Bobby Scott said the combination of a hiring freeze and layoffs has caused staff shortages at Department of Veterans Affairs facilities throughout Hampton Roads.
“It is understandably difficult to recruit people when you've announced that you're going to fire tens of thousands of people. Who wants to be a provisional employee? People with these jobs have options,” said Scott, a Democrat and longtime congressman from Newport News.
VA Secretary Doug Collins walked back a plan announced earlier this year to fire up to 70,000 employees, but the VA still expects 30,000 workers will leave voluntarily by September.
Under half of the staff has been hired at the North Battlefield Clinic in Chesapeake since it opened in April. The staff is now up to 248 people, though some of those positions have been filled by people who transferred from the main hospital in Hampton, creating other vacancies in the system.
When the facility opened, Collins declared it would open in phases and would not be up to full staff until January. As part of that phased opening, the clinic was supposed to begin offering dental services in July. The one dentist hired could not start for personal reasons, according to an email response from John Rogers, a spokesman for the Hampton VA.
Chesapeake has among the fastest-growing veteran populations in the country. The North Battlefield clinic has room for more than a dozen patients at a time, Scott said.
“Hiring people in this atmosphere that's been caused by the Trump administration and the Secretary of the VA has caused the problem, making it more difficult to recruit. Although the workers here are doing a good job, you can't do a good job without enough staff,” Scott said.
The independent VA Inspector General released a report this week highlightingcritical staff shortages nationwide, which have doubled over the last year. The data comes from an annual survey of all 139 VA facilities nationwide, which was conducted in March and April. Staff shortages reflect the difficulty the local VA has when hiring staff, rather than whether a position is vacant. Hampton listed a number of critical shortages, including 14 medical officer positions and 14 nursing positions.
VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said the VA rejects the validity of the annual survey because the numbers don’t reflect vacancies..
“VA’s department-wide vacancy rates for doctors and nurses are 14% and 10%, respectively. These are lower than most other health care systems,” he said.
Last week the VA announced it was throwing out nearly all of its union contracts. The union was forced out of its office space inside VA facilities within days. The loss can also impact hiring, said Stacy Shorter, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 2328.
“When you're talking about trying to find a good place to work, you're going to look at salary. You're going to look at benefits. You're going to look at working conditions. One of the things that we had to offer was we have a collective bargaining agreement,” she said.
AFGE has filed a lawsuit to stop the VA from vacating its contracts.
Without a collective bargaining agreement, workers no longer have a union-management process for filing work-related grievances and the VA has yet to outline an administrative process for handling workplace issues, Shorter said.
