The Department of Veterans Affairs has carried on with the practice of hiring doctors with malpractice claims and felony convictions in their backgrounds.
A USA Today investigation has found that the VA’s hiring process for physicians may not be as thorough as it seems. The hiring process entails license verification and reference-checking, but it appears as though VA officials have some amount of discretion when they discover medical licensing problems, malpractice or felony convictions.
In other words, VA officials can simply disregard sordid pasts and approve hiring of questionable doctors, anyway.
For example, in one case USA Today uncovered, a VA hospital in Muskogee, Oklahoma, brought on a psychiatrist in 2013, despite knowing he had a history of actions taken against his medical license for sexual misconduct, among other things.
This psychiatrist, Stephen Lester Greer, ended up having a sexual relationship with a patient at the VA.
In August, he pleaded guilty to trying to persuade the patient to lie about the relationship.
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