[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 60 (Wednesday, April 16, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H2425-H2426]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
VETERANS CARE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, occasionally things happen when
you're in Congress that make you so angry that you can't hardly stand
it.
I got a call this past week, Mr. Speaker, from a friend of mine from
my childhood. And her brother is a veteran who was in the veterans
hospital, and he was assigned to a community residential care program.
That's where they put one of these veterans into a home in a
neighborhood with other veterans, and they're supposed to be cared for.
She told me that the place where he was being kept was not clean and
that the room he was in had a window that was sealed shut. He took
oxygen, and there were no signs or anything that dealt with the oxygen
that he was taking. A dog in the house came into his room and chewed
through his oxygen tube. He had to keep his door shut, so it virtually
made him a prisoner in this house.
There were four veterans in this house. And the attitude of the
person who ran this home was not anything that you would call conducive
to good care. The two sisters of his were very, very upset and they
thought that he shouldn't be kept in this place, and they asked me if I
would check into it. So I called the caseworker, a lady named Pat Erp,
and she told me that everything out there was fine. I said I wanted to
see for myself. So I went out to the house. By the time I had arrived,
they had contacted the woman who owned the house, and she was very
hostile and said she wouldn't allow me, even though I was a Member of
Congress, to take a look at the circumstances under which Mr. English
was living, that's my buddy from childhood, Paul English. I didn't want
to press the case, so I called the director of the Roudebush Hospital
in Indianapolis. He wasn't in, but I did get his assistant director,
who was very nice, and he agreed to have somebody come out there and
take a look at the situation.
He came out with two ladies who were nurses there. And my childhood
friend's sister went into the house with him to try to get his clothes
and everything out of there so they could take him to her house until
they found another place for him to be kept.
They were hostile, the two nurses from the Roudebush Hospital were
hostile. They evidently changed the cord on his oxygen equipment, and
they said that nothing like that happened, and yet his sister saw that
it happened and they were very upset.
The room in the house was not clean. He had two towels in his room,
both of which had holes in them, obviously older. And on the weekends,
the caseworker said that the woman who took care of these veterans who
were in her care would leave for the weekend and left a pot of food on
the stove.
This isn't the way that our veterans ought to be taken care of when
they're in a community residential care program, so I decided to pursue
it further.
[[Page H2426]]
And I got a call today and I returned the call of a lady named Phyllis
Beamon, who is the head of the Extended Care Unit at the Indianapolis
Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Roudebush Hospital today. And she
indicated that everything was fine and that they've used this house and
this caregiver since 1983. And I could only imagine what other veterans
had to live with who lived in this house since 1983 and were given this
kind of ``care.''
I can't tell you how this affected me. I served on the Veterans
Affairs Committee for 10 years. And I had heard stories like this
before, but I always felt that the veterans were getting the quality of
care that we were paying for as taxpayers, and they were being taken
care of. And yet my friend from my childhood was being mistreated, in
my opinion.
His sister finally got him out of there and took him to her house.
And the day after she took him to her house, because of the stress he
was under, he had a heart attack. He went to the hospital and they put
two stints in him and he did survive.
Don't misunderstand, Mr. Speaker, I think the people that serve in
our veterans hospitals for the most part do an outstanding job. The
nurses and the doctors who serve our veterans do a good job, but there
are occasions when the care is not just less than adequate, it's almost
criminally inadequate.
{time} 1915
And this is one of the cases that really bothers me. And I'm going to
call for a complete investigation of the Community Residential Care
program and the people who provide it at the Indianapolis Roudebush
Hospital, not because I don't think that most of the people who work at
the hospital do a good job, because I think they do, but I think
there's a dereliction of responsibility in this Community Residential
Care program that needs to be corrected and it needs to be corrected
very, very quickly.
We shouldn't have a veteran in a room in a house with the windows
sealed so he can't get out in the event of an emergency. We shouldn't
have him taking oxygen with a dog that's going to come in the room and
chew on his oxygen tube. We shouldn't have people that are leaving the
premises unattended with four veterans in there on a weekend and
telling their relatives, well, you ought to take him someplace else
because there won't be anybody here, and if they are here, they leave
the food on the stove so they can get their own food. And these people,
many of them, are mentally challenged, like my friend is. He's had some
psychological problems.
Let me just say in closing, Mr. Speaker, this is something that needs
to be addressed. There needs to be an investigation of the Community
Residential Care program in Indianapolis, and if it's like this in
other parts of the country, we need to have a national investigation.
____________________