GAO finds Army medical evaluations lacking

GAO finds Army medical evaluations lacking

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Jun 10, 2008 17:10:17 EDT

The Army does not keep good enough records to properly determine which soldiers with medical issues are eligible to deploy, according to a new Government Accountability Office study released Tuesday.

And GAO estimated that 3 percent of soldiers deploying from Forts Benning and Stewart in Georgia and Fort Drum, N.Y., who are required by their medical issues to go before the medical evaluation board did not do so before they deployed.

In other words, soldiers who might have been discharged from the military for medical conditions that make them unable to do their jobs were instead deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. The GAO chose those bases because they had large numbers of deployed soldiers during the year previous to the study.

“In some cases, soldiers were not evaluated because commanders lacked timely access to profiles,” the report stated. “In other cases, commanders did not take timely actions.”
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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/06/military_medicalissues_deploy_061008w/