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Nurses at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Decatur plan to protest Saturday against proposed federal layoffs that they say will impact patient care at the facility that serves more than 125,000 veterans each year.
Two VA employee unions are organizing the protest outside the medical center at 1670 Clairmont Rd. National Nurses United represents 1,000 registered nurses at the facility. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 518 represents over 1,100 crisis hotline workers and member services employees.
The protest, scheduled for 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., will put a spotlight on former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, a Georgia native, who was appointed VA secretary by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February.
Collins has outlined plans to cut the VA workforce by nearly 15% following an executive order from Trump in February calling for agency heads to prepare for “large-scale reductions in force.”
“Our goal is to reduce VA employment levels to 2019 numbers of roughly 398,000 employees from our current level of approximately 470,000 employees — a nearly 15% decrease. We will accomplish this without making cuts to health care or benefits to veterans and VA beneficiaries,” Collins wrote in an opinion piece in The Hill last month.
“VA will always fulfill its duty to provide veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors the health care and benefits they have earned. That is a promise,” Collins wrote.
Teshara Felder, a steward for National Nurses United who works as a registered nurse at the Decatur VA hospital, told Healthbeat that while nurse staffing can’t be cut because it is determined by patient need, the loss of other VA employees and services will impact veterans’ care.
Felder gave the example of the prosthetics department, which is down to one employee who plans to retire within the year. Felder said nurses end up doing work to help fill the gaps in services.
“We are being asked to do more with less, and that’s always a problem. … And we can see this trickling down to the patient care,” Felder said. “Even if we the nurses remain, we still don’t have enough people to do all those other services.”
The Decatur hospital lists long wait times for patients to get appointments. For example, new patients face waits of 109 days for gastroenterology and 67 days for neurology appointments.
Existing patients face waits of 191 days for women’s services and 64 days for pain medicine, data from the Atlanta VA facility shows.
VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz told Healthbeat the agency is “working hard to fix these and other issues.”
“Unfortunately, many in the media, government, union bosses and some in Congress are fighting to keep in place the broken status quo,” he said. “Our message to veterans is simple: Despite major opposition from those who don’t want to change a thing at VA, we will reform the department to make it work better for veterans, families, caregivers and survivors.”
Felder said the government could be more efficient, but solutions should be implemented with a “fine-tuned” method that will take “time and care.”
“It is a violation of trust … that people who gave so much are getting taken away from them,” Felder said. “Stop the cuts. Stop doing this to the people who matter, who have done so much.”
“We’re not talking about reducing medical staff or claims processors, we’re talking about reducing bureaucracy and inefficiencies that are getting in the way of customer convenience and service to veterans,” Kasperowicz said.
Social worker Erika Alexander, president of AFGE Local 518, said she is worried about veterans’ mental health if employees are laid off. Some of those she represents work as responders for the Veterans Crisis Line.
“If you’re working with a veteran that is suicidal and needs to get connected to mental health resources, and they have to wait three months before they can talk to a psychiatrist to be prescribed medication, or a therapist, or a social worker, or psychologist to process what they witnessed during war, that’s one [more] day that they’re at risk of ending their lives,” Alexander said.
“Having to wait for that appointment so that you can address the chronic pain, or that you can address the nausea that you’re dealing with every day because you’re having anxiety, or the irritability that’s impacting their daily lives,” Alexander said. “It’s impacting their family members, the people that they live with, the people that they love.”
The proposed job cuts come amid other changes at the VA under Collins’ leadership. The agency will create a task force to examine whether “anti-Christian bias” exists at the agency, Military.Com reported Wednesday.
The VA cut about 585 contracts worth about $1.8 billion, the agency said on March 3, and fired about 1,400 “non-mission-critical employees” and about 1,000 probationary employees in February, according to press releases.
This story has been updated with comment from VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz.
Rebecca Grapevine is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Rebecca at rgrapevine@healthbeat.org.
