Veterans Health Care: Addressing High Risk Concerns for Oversight and Accountability Are Key to Ensuring Quality of Care and Patient Safety

We testified about the Department of Veterans Affairs’ ongoing struggles to oversee its health care system, including its ability to provide quality and safe care to veterans.

We have made 131 oversight and accountability recommendations since adding VA health care to our High Risk List in 2015, including those focused on patient safety. For example, a recommendation in 2021 led VA to exclude 155 providers from working in VA’s community care networks, some of whom had been previously removed from VA facility employment for failure to provide safe care.

VA leadership needs to address VA’s fragmented oversight and accountability infrastructure.

What GAO Found

GAO’s work has identified a...