KANSAS CITY, Mo.— A Wisconsin senator has accused the Department of Veterans of Affairs of firing a doctor for speaking out about alleged shortcomings at a Missouri VA hospital and then thwarting his efforts to get hired at another VA site.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who heads the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, wrote in a recent letter to the VA’s acting secretary that the department should “cease all retaliatory actions” against Dr. Dale Klein.
Klein was hired in 2015 to be a pain-management doctor at the John J. Pershing VA Medical Center in Poplar Bluff. Nearly four months into the job, he reported to the VA’s watchdog his worries that patients were selling their medications and that the VA wasn’t doing enough to halt it, according to the Office of Special Counsel. That independent, prosecutorial agency protects federal whistleblowers.
Klein also voiced concerns to the VA’s Office of Inspector General that he was not being provided with a sterile area to perform injections and other interventional procedures, according to the OSC’s filings with the Merit Systems Protection Board. That panel arbitrates disputes between civil servants and federal supervisors.
Klein, still during his job’s probationary period, later was reprimanded by a supervisor and in April 2016 was fired as recommended by a professional standards board that handles employment and promotion reviews, according to the OSC.
In its decision, the OSC claims, the board wrote that its decision wasn’t based on Klein’s patient care but instead “on the poor interactions (he) had with multiple employees and departments throughout the facility, his consistent acceleration of trivial matters through his chain of comment, and an unwillingness to take direction” from superiors.
At the OSC’s urging, Klein’s ouster has been repeatedly delayed, though he has been assigned to administrative duties unrelated to a physician’s tasks.
