Addressing patient scheduling delays at the Department of Veterans Affairs

Organizational Development at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been a cabinet-level agency since 1989 that is tasked with providing an array of services to eligible veterans and their families (VA fact sheet, 2016). In recent years, the VA has experienced a number of organizational development-related problems including most especially delays in patient scheduling that demand viable solutions. To this end, this paper provides an overview of the VA and a description of an intervention project that can help this organization overcome its current constraints to the provision of high-quality administrative and healthcare services to the nation's veterans and their families. Finally, the paper concludes with a description of who would be contacted at the VA by an external organizational development (OD) consultant to coordinate a contract to address these problems.

Background information on the organization

At present, with nearly 280,000 workers on the rolls, the VA has more employees than any other government agency except the Department of Defense (VA fact sheet, 2016). While the VA is tasked with providing a wide range of services to veterans and their families, the most visible part of the VA is the Department of Health Services (DHS) that provides healthcare services to 5.5 million veteran patients each year (VA fact sheet, 2016). In addition, the DHS trains about 90,000 new physicians each year and is the largest healthcare service in the United States today (VA fact sheet, 2016).

Contact point and needed information for an external OD consultant contract

Although a nationwide problem, most of the delays in patient scheduled that are being experienced by the VA have taken place at a relatively small number of medical centers. Therefore, the OD consultation contract should specify which medical centers will be analyzed for improvement. The contact point for this type of contract with the VA is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition and Logistics in Washington, DC (Doing business with the VA, 2016).