Fedweek

The bill authorizes the VA to buy out contracts of some health care providers in exchange for commitments to work at rural VA facilities for at least four years. Image: Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock.com

The Senate has joined the House in passing a bill (S-3373) containing a number of enhanced salary, bonus and incentive payment authorities for the VA, while a survey of VA employees has shown the negative impacts of the department’s continuing high rate of unfilled positions.

The personnel provisions were attached to a bill to enhance benefits for veterans who were exposed to toxic chemicals from military burn pits that now goes to President Biden for a promised signature.

Those provisions include: requiring the VA to establish standard qualifications and performance metrics for HR positions and produce a plan for improving hiring for those positions; allowing expedited hiring of recent college graduates for certain positions; enhancing or creating a number of special pay, incentive, bonus, awards and student loan repayment authorities department-wide; and raising pay caps on certain medical positions.

Also: ordering the VA to assess staffing shortages in rural clinics and other health care facilities and produce a national plan to improve recruiting and hiring in rural areas; allowing more positions to be filled through special hiring authorities for recent college graduates; and allowing VA to pay to buy out contracts of certain health care providers in exchange for commitments to work at rural VA facilities for at least four years.

Meanwhile a survey by the AFGE union to which some 2,300 of its members at the VA responded found that half “reported that beds, units, or programs have been closed in their facility due to staffing and budget shortages, even when there is a patient demand for such services.”

While the workforce is “deeply committed to caring for veterans and fulfilling the VA’s many missions,” the union said, it “is experiencing increasing burnout and job dissatisfaction due to chronic underfunding and understaffing. Sixty percent of respondents reported losing key resources, especially staff, over the last four years.

Nearly 90 percent said their facilities needed more frontline staff. Seventy percent said they needed more administrative/ support staff. Sixty-four percent said that there are vacant positions for which no recruitment is taking place.”

The union also said that a HR modernization project “which was ostensibly designed to improve both working conditions and quality of care, is failing. Forty percent of respondents said the modernization project has increased delays in hiring. Facilities are hemorrhaging staff, with too few being replaced.”

The union also said that the increase in veterans’ care by outside providers has caused a fifth of employees to spend part of their working time to monitoring such care and that a third cited problems with coordinating such care with care provided directly by the VA.

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See also,

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Retiring from a Federal Job – Getting Started

2022 Federal Employees Handbook