My Dad is a disabled marine. He has been fighting with the Salt Lake VA Hospital for years now. No matter what help he needs, they always make sure to extend any surgery until it's at the state of emergency. He just recently had back surgery, after 2 years or so of being jerked around and put on waiting list after waiting list. They came up with every excuse in the book not to do the surgery, whether it was instead giving him pain medication, or a shot that is supposably going to ""take the pain"" away. At the same time, his right knee was due to be replaced, but because of his back being so bad, they scheduled emergency surgery for that instead. Now that he has recovered from the back surgery, he was trying to get them into replacing his knee, and again he is getting excuse after excuse on it. Not only that, but his primary care doctor has been switched on him more times than i can count in just the last 5 years. Now, I also take into consideration that these providers are interns, not doctors, but come on man. He gets a new doctor and has to start all over again! When my father was in the hospital in recovery this last time, the RN's and the aids were all very rude, taking a good amount of time to get back to you, even for a glass of water, because they are too busy sitting at the computers playing games and chatting like little school girls about some new found gossip. The room my father was in was absolutely filthy...(I worked at the university hospital for housekeeping for 2 years, and if I would have cleaned the rooms like this one was, I would have lost my job.) The VA needs to clean up their staff, and get people in there that actually care about the patients. This is absolutely ridiculous!
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