The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning for a different type of surge next month.
The Veterans Health Administration will hold a national onboarding surge event the week of Nov. 14, VA Undersecretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal said during a media roundtable on Wednesday.
“This event will be focused on the onboarding process, in particular after selection, because we know that comprises a significant timespan, even after selections are made. And we know that, to some frequency, we lose folks after we’ve made the selection, because of how long that can take,” Elnahal said.
The “all-hands-on-deck” effort is necessary because VA needs to bring on board about 52,000 new staffers each year to keep up with both attrition in its workforce and with the increasing number of veterans entering the system for care, he said.
Individuals who have already accepted a job offer from VA will have the onboarding process fast-tracked as a result of the event. Elnahal said the event will also assist with meeting hiring requirements related to the recently passed PACT Act.
“This will be not only a chance to have a step function improvement in the number of folks on board, which is an urgent priority, but to also set the groundwork for the more longitudinal work that we will need to do to improve the hiring process to improve our systems that our employees interface with, and ultimately to get more folks in the door as we proceed with this important priority,” he said.
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Elnahal also addressed the possibility of another COVID-19 later this year, saying that VA has “the tools now to really weather another wave of increased cases in ways that we didn’t have before.”
He said called a new bivalent vaccine encouraging and said it has the potential to provide even more protection against new COVID-19 variants.
“That is being administered now across the country in VA facilities,” he said. “And we are looking diligently to make sure that the availability of therapeutics is robust.”
Elnahal also said that the VA is re-examining its real estate needs in a “bottoms up” process after a group of senators rejected its plan to close, build or update medical facilities around the country under the Asset and Infrastructure Review Commission process as mandated by the MISSION Act.
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“This is going to be a diligent process that’s going to start over because we think it needs to start over,” he said. “Trends have changed significantly since the pandemic.”
Elnahal said the average age of VA hospitals and clinics is 60 years, far exceeding the private sector facilities age.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.