You have physcian options with Veteran Affairs (VA).

When you get a medical appointment with the VA, you go to a VA Medical Center (VAMC) or a Community-Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC) or clinic.

You may be seen by a physician, a physician assistant (PA) or  a nurse practitioner (NP). All three are collectively referred to as clinicians.

Suppose you get a bad clinician. I hear about complaints about "doctors" all he time on the Internet. Of course, the bad doctor may a PA or an NP because the VA has a huge shortage of physicians. In fact, VA secretary, Bob McDonald, wants to hire 28,000 for physicians.

Bad doctors are not unique to the VA. In the past 7 years, I changed private practice endocrinologists twice and neurologists once. You can often go on the Internet to find information on physicians, PAs and NPs.  You can also subscribe to Angie's List and pay an extra fee to get patient ratings of people and institutions in the medical community.

If you get a bad  VA clinician , what can to do? You can contact the Patient's Advocate office and ask for a new physician. Make it clear you want a physician, and not a PA or NP.

If the second physician is also problematic, then go back to Patient Advocates Office and file another complaint.

This time a patient affairs is supposed to assign a private practice physician to provide medical care.

Hopefully your third attempt for medical care will be successful.

By the way, the CBOCs or clinics often have many of the functions that a VAMC has. For example. the Palm Harbor CBOC has both Patient Advocate and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) offices.




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Veteran Affairs DBQ's are superb

Rightardia like the new Veterans Affairs Disability Benefits Questionnaires. 

These can be filled out online by doctors or downloaded and completed by typing medical data into them. In the past many government forms could be filled out and printed, but not saved.

This meant that the document had to completely retyped if changes were needed. This is not the case with the DBQ. You can now save the documents in PDF or text format.

Most people would probably rough out one of these documents and take it their primary care doctor or specialist  for completion and signature.

However, you could also take this form to to your VA Medical Center (VAMC) or Community-Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOC) as well. You could ask either your primary care doctor or specialist to complete a DBQ for you.

The Major recently got a ruling form the VA Regional Office and noticed references form his Compensation and Pension exams in the ruling but none from the VAMC specialist physician. .

Unfortunately most of the C&P clinicians at a very large VA facility in Florida are not doctors. There are more Physicians' Assistant or  Nurse Practitioners.


When the Ratings Veterans Service Representative (RSVR) review the Claim file (c-file), he or she  primarily considers the C&P physical, rather than the patent's Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) entries from the hospital or clinic.

If you have a condition that requires the diagnosis of a specialist, this will likely result in a lowball rating.

The solution is to ask the VAMC specialist to compete a DBQ. To this, you must first coordinate through your primary care physician who can complete a DBQ as well and forward a second DBQ to your specialist.

The Major just went through a Decision Review officer (DRO) review and the DRO asked for a DBQ. We recommend you work with your VAMC physicians to get a DBQ to counter the superficial diagnoses that is a likely outcome from a C&P exam.

We also recommend you go to the Freedom of information Act (FOIA) office and get a copy of the C&P exam to recalma it. You will probably see numerous errors of omission and commission.

Rightardia has been hard on the VA system in the past.but we are seeing big improvements since Obama became president and General Shinseki took over the VA helm.

The VA is a becoming the model organization in the federal government. 

We suspect he DBQs will make claims easier for the veteran and also for the RSVR's to rate. These forms were first used for new presumptive Agent Orange claims.

Rightardia suspects the DBQ will become the primary means for substantiating claims in the future for both VA and private physicians.

Perhaps the C&P exams will also become optional with the advent of the DBQ.

See the latest DBQs at http://benefits.va.gov/TRANSFORMATION/dbqs/ListByDBQFormName.asp

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Rightardia by Rightard Whitey of Rightardia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at rightardia@gmail.com.