Nearly 40 percent of California's 61 Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics had higher-than-average percentage of delayed appointments.
Nationally, nearly 894,000 appointments -- or about 2.8 percent-- completed at Veterans Affairs centers from August to February involved a delay of at least a month, missing the VA's timeliness goal, which calls for patients to be seen within 30 days.
The Sacramento VA hospital had the highest percentage of appointments delayed by at least a month among VA centers in California.
VA officials say there's demand for specialty care such as sleep studies and orthopedics. The Sacramento hospital is hiring more doctors, nurses and staff to keep up with demand.
The AP examined wait times at 940 individual VA facilities to gauge changes since a scandal over delays led to the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki in May and prompted lawmakers to pass the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act in August. It is difficult to quantify exactly how things have changed because the VA introduced a new method for measuring wait times at the end of the summer.
The trend across the nation, however, is clear: In either analysis, the number of vets waiting more than 30 or 60 days for non-emergency care has largely stayed flat. The number of medical appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete jumped to nearly 13,000 in January and more than 10,000 in February, compared to an average of around 5,900 the previous five months.
The longest waits were in the South and parts of the West while relatively few VA facilities in the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast states reported having significant numbers of patients with extraordinary waits. In California, nearly 40 percent of the state's 61 VA hospitals and clinics had a higher-than-average percentage of delayed appointments.
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VA officials have cautioned that it will take time for reforms to make a difference. The agency has received an additional $16.3 billion to hire doctors, open more clinics and build the new Choice program that allows vets facing long delays or long drives to get care from a private-sector doctor.
