Visits: 8
A Department of Veterans Affairs health care worker said she received a letter from the agency on Monday notifying her that she would be terminated, just one day before she was scheduled to testify at a congressional hearing about how the VA treats other whistleblowers.
Baltimore psychologist Minu Aghevli said she received the letter, which outlined the VA Maryland Health Care Center’s proposal to terminate her employment, after working for the agency for nearly 20 years.
A letter from her legal team to the Office of Special Counsel — which aims to safeguard federal employees, especially whistleblowers — says Aghevli received the “notice of proposed removal” on June 24.
“The notice of proposed removal was issued immediately after the Agency learned that Dr. Aghevli’s disclosures would be the subject of a front-page story in USA Today and that she would be testifying before Congress,” her legal team wrote in the letter to OSC.
“The reasons set forth by the Agency for proposing Dr. Aghevli’s removal are without merit and cannot be the actual reasons for proposing her removal.”
Aghevli did not send ABC News a copy of the letter because she said wanted to send her official response first. The Department of Veterans Affairs did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Aghevli, who served as the former coordinator of the department’s opioid-addiction treatment program in Baltimore, said hospital officials cited in the letter an ongoing matter with a patient’s follow-up care and gave her several business days to respond.
Aghevli said the letter was the latest attempt by the department to reprimand her for blowing the whistle back in 2014, when she reported that veterans had been removed improperly from waitlists for opioid-addiction treatment.
“In the span of five years, I’ve brought up concerns that we were hiding a waitlist, I’ve brought up very serious patient safety concerns, I’ve brought up access to care concerns and I’ve brought up concerns about a patient death,” Aghevli told ABC News. “None of those things, even when they’ve been substantiated, have resulted in any of the other people involved being disciplined.”
Aghevli called the termination proposal scary because it appears to be a warning shot to ward off other potential whistleblowers. She said she doesn’t know, for sure, if there was a “threat to other staff, but that’s a little bit what it feels like.”
“So, if what staff see is that the person bringing up those concerns is getting fired, I think the message is pretty clear,” she said. “The fact that they’re telling me today, right before my testimony, it makes me feel like perhaps they want other people to hear that this happened to me.
“And that’s really upsetting. I don’t like to be used as a pawn.”
Aghevli first reported concerns over hospital waitlists in 2014, just as a national scandal erupted over wait times, amid allegations patients had died waiting for care at a VA facility in Phoenix.
She said the VA has “engaged in continuous retaliation” against her in an apparent effort to oust her from the agency ever since she first reported her concerns.
“In order to reduce the waitlist, I was instructed to improperly remove veterans from the electronic waitlist by scheduling fake appointments for them in an imaginary clinic,” Aghevli said in remarks she prepared to share with Congress on Tuesday. “This clinic was not tied to any provider or location, nor did it actually correspond to any real visits and accordingly. The veterans scheduled for these fictitious appointments were not actually receiving VA care.”
“The VA also pressured me to artificially reduce the number of patients on the waitlist through other improper means,” she added.
Aghevli says she was stripped of her patient-care privileges and assigned to do “menial administrative tasks” after reporting her concerns about patient care.
“Two months ago, I was told that my clinical privileges are being suspended. So since that time I have been forbidden from having any clinical contact with patients and I was assigned to pretty menial administrative tasks,” she added. “It felt like I was put in a position where I would be especially visible to other staff to make it sort of a publicly humiliating situation.”
