507: Leadership and Accountability at the VA. With Secretary Doug Collins
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
This is Jocko Podcast number 507 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. A veteran committed suicide by setting himself on fire in front of a New Jersey VA clinic after staff at the clinic repeatedly failed to ensure he received adequate mental health care. an investigation of the death found.
Department of Veterans Affairs staff cancelled an appointment Charles Ingram had in fall 2015 because a provider was unavailable, didn't follow up to reschedule, and when he walked into the clinic to ask for an appointment, they didn't schedule it until three months later The VA Inspector General found. Ingram, a 51-year-old Gulf War veteran, had been approved to receive treatment at a non-VA facility, but no one at VA contacted him or scheduled an appointment. In March 2016, shortly before his VA appointment, Ingram went into the clinic in Northfield, New Jersey, doused himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire. The clinic was closed at the time.
Staff failed to show up on no-shows, clinic cancellations, termination of services, and non-VA care coordination consults as required, the inspector general wrote in a report released Wednesday. This led to a lack of ordered mental health therapy and necessary medications and may have contributed to his distress. And that right there is from a USA Today article from 2017, and the article goes on to say that after the death, the VA, quote, allocated more clinical resources to the clinic, removed the hospital director overseeing the facility, and instituted same-day mental health services for urgent cases. End quote. And so some lessons were learned, but clearly at a devastating cost.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (107 minutes, 24,472 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.