Health Care: The Quality of Care Provided by Some VA Psychiatric Hospitals Is Inadequate

GAO discussed psychiatric quality assurance programs at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) psychiatric hospitals. GAO noted that: (1) none of the four VA psychiatric hospitals visited collected the kind of quality assurance data needed to demonstrate that their psychiatric programs fully met patients' psychiatric needs, because VA did not define its requirement for evaluating psychiatric programs, and personnel at two hospitals were not documenting the reasons why they placed patients under restraints and seclusion; (2) hospital staff in two VA hospitals are not timely correcting problems identified through patient incident reports; (3) quality assurance programs in VA and non-VA hospitals are similar; and (4) quality-of-care problems resulting in complications or death occur in both VA and non-VA psychiatric hospitals.