Report: One Third Of Calls To VA Suicide Hotline Go Unanswered

Front-line staffers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ suicide hotline fail to pick up more than one third of calls placed, the former hotline director said in a new report.

Greg Hughes, who used to serve as director of the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line, said that some people who work the hotline speak to fewer than five callers during each shift and leave before they are supposed to, even though the volume of calls has shot up in recent years, reports the Associated Press. Crisis calls also routinely go to voicemail, an internal watchdog said.

Hughes said that some staffers “spend very little time on the phone or engaged in assigned productive activity” and that the crisis line is not always fully staffed “because we have staff who routinely request to leave early.”

During May, between 35 and 40 percent of crisis calls were not answered and rolled over to backup centers, where workers are not thoroughly trained in handling callers’ problems, Hughes wrote in an email.

Hughes left his job in June.

Following the revelations, the VA said on September 26 that it will soon increase its staff at the New York call center and will open an additional call hub in Atlanta. The department also said that it would work to improve training.

“We are saving thousands of lives,” David Shulkin, the VA’s undersecretary for health, said in a statement. “But we will not rest as long as there are veterans who remain at risk.”

Approximately 20 veterans die from suicide each day.

The news comes just more than a week after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would crack down on excessive VA healthcare wait times, a scandal that has been keeping veterans from accessing timely medical attention for at least two years, notes Fox News.

“For too long, union bosses, administration officials and their enablers have used every trick in the book to help VA bureaucrats who can’t or won’t do their jobs remain firmly entrenched in the agency’s bureaucracy,” House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller said of the bill, which he said would “get rid of loopholes” that allow incompetent employees to keep their jobs. “Union bosses and defenders of the broken status quo will oppose this bill, and that is exactly why it must become law.”

​Sources: Associated Press via NBC News, Fox News / Photo Credit:Petiatil/Wikimedia Commons