Department of Veterans Affairs is incorrectly reporting suicide data

Veteran suicide tracking faulted
Government report says VA data is being incorrectly reported
UT San Diego
By Ashly McGlone
DEC. 31, 2014

A 24-hour confidential Veteran’s Crisis Line first established in 2007 for veterans, their families and friends fielded about 287,000 calls, 54,800 online chats, and 11,300 text messages in fiscal year 2013, the report says.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is incorrectly reporting suicide data and poorly tracks and cares for vets at risk of suicide who are prescribed antidepressants, a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office suggests.

A yearlong audit discovered multiple instances where agency protocols for treatment of veteran depression were broken, and patient and suicide data was flawed, the Dec. 12 report states.

Ten percent of those who received veteran health care in the past five years were diagnosed with major depressive disorder, or more than 532,000 veterans. Nearly all of them were prescribed antidepressants, but policies for follow-up care were rarely followed in the cases sampled, the audit states.

Independent government reviewers inspected 30 medical files for veterans prescribed antidepressants following a major depression diagnosis at six VA medical centers in New York, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada spanning fiscal years 2009 through 2013.

Twenty-six of those veterans weren’t assessed after four to six weeks as specified in the VA’s clinical practice guidelines, and 10 veterans did not receive follow-up care within the time frame recommended, the audit found.
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