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How the VA fails veterans on mental health By Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
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veteran with a known history of suicidal thoughts showed up at a St. Louis hospital before dawn one morning and was left unmonitored in an exam room for hours. Another was deemed at risk of suicide by a hospital psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., then forcibly discharged, even as he tried to stay, by the same hospital’s emergency department. Another still in Pittsburgh was assigned a behavioral health nurse who failed to complete thorough suicide screenings or review his suicide safety plan, and didn’t follow up when he said he wished he was dead. In all three cases, independent inspectors documented serious failures by the Department of Veterans Affairs. And in all three cases, the veterans involved went on to kill themselves or other people. The lapses were similar to ones examined by ProPublica Jan. 6 in an investigation of the VA’s handling of two veterans with serious mental disorders. Both suffered for years with inadequate care from the same clinic in Northern California, they told reporters. Their stories ended in tragedy. The problems appear to be systemic. Over and over, the hospitals and clinics in the VA’s sprawling health care network have fallen short when it comes to treating people with mental illness. That conclusion emerges from a ProPublica review of all of the reports published by the VA’s inspector general since 2020. That includes 162 regular surveys of facilities and 151 investigations that were triggered by a complaint or call to
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Riverside County names new Child Support Services director By Staff
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he Board of Supervisors on Tuesday appointed Nicole Windom-Hurd as Riverside County’s new director of the Child Support Services Department. Windom-Hurd has extensive experience in public service and child support services and will lead an agency that provides legal and medical-related services to children and families in the county. Windom-Hurd has worked for Riverside County for more than 23 years as an executive with Child Support Services and the Office of County Counsel. She has been the assistant director for Child Support Services since 2018 overseeing “the department’s implementation of goals, objectives, work standards and policies,” officials said in a statement announcing Windom-Hurd’s appointment. “Nicole’s wealth of experience and leadership qualities will undoubtedly strengthen our efforts to support families and ensure the well-being of children in our community,” Board of Supervisors Chair Chuck Washing-
See Child Support Services Page 23
Moreno Valley Ponzi scheme operator pleads guilty to fraud Disabled, homeless Vietnam veteran. | Photo by Gilbert Mercier CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
the office on a wide variety of alleged health care problems. Issues with mental health care surfaced in half of the routine inspections. Employees botched screenings meant to assess veterans’ risk of suicide or violence; sometimes they didn’t perform the screenings at all. They missed mandatory mental health training programs and failed to follow up with patients as required by VA protocol. One in 4 of the reports stemming from calls or complaints detailed similar breakdowns. In the most extreme cases, facilities lost track of veterans or failed to prevent suicides under their own roofs. Sixteen veterans who received the substandard care killed either themselves
or other people, the review revealed. An additional five died for reasons related to the poor care, such as a bad drug interaction that the reports say could have been prevented. Twenty-one such deaths is a meaningful count even for a health care system that has more than 9 million people enrolled, in the view of Charles Figley, a Tulane University professor and expert in military mental health. The VA has struggled with mental health care for decades, he said. “It’s a national disgrace.” For grieving family members, it is incomprehensible. “It was never my expectation that [the VA was] going to solve his problems,” said Colin Domek, the son of See Mental health Page 12
the veteran in Pittsburgh. “My expectations were that someone who was saying ‘help me’ would receive some kind of help.” The inspector general reports reviewed by ProPublica have limitations. The individual investigations can be narrow. The reports offer only broad suggestions as to whether individuals should be held accountable for breakdowns and provide little sense of whether they actually were. Even together, they don’t capture the full reality of the VA’s 1,300 health care facilities. But they do start to assemble a meaningful picture of the system’s most chronic shortcomings when it comes to treating people
By City News Service
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59-year-old Moreno Valley man who ran a Ponzi scheme that netted over $20 million from unsuspecting investors could face up to 20 years in federal prison when he is sentenced, authorities said Tuesday. Paul Horton Smith Sr. pleaded guilty Monday to wire fraud under an agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. U.S. District Court Judge Jesus Bernal accepted the plea and scheduled Smith’s sentencing for April 1 at the federal courthouse in downtown Riverside. Smith remains free on bond. All of Smith’s companies, operating under the Northstar Communications umbrella, were shut down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2020. According to federal prosecutors, Smith operated a Ponzi scheme from July 2000 to May 2020, when he was arrested. Smith defrauded at least 200 investors, procuring roughly $24 million in ill-gotten gains, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. Instead of investing funds lodged in Northstar and subsidiary accounts, he shelled out money received from new investors to satisfy rates of return guaranteed to earlier ones, never turning an honest profit, according to the government. See Ponzi scheme Page 24