FAYETTEVILLE, N.C.
The director of the Fayetteville VA Medical Center is retiring amid reports of dissatisfaction among employees and patients at a hospital that has struggled with adversity for more than a decade.
Fayetteville VA Director Bruce Triplett will leave his post on Nov. 20, The Fayetteville Observer reported today.
The hospital near Fort Bragg scored the lowest on two government surveys of patients and workers among the eight VA hospitals in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
Triplett said that he has been eligible to retire for a year, and the time now seemed right.
He said that during his three-year tenure he has raised the local VA from a national rank of 137th in performance standards to 58th. There also have been no layoffs or pay cuts in recent years at the medical center that serves for more than 170,000 veterans in southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina, Triplett said,
"The patient satisfaction and employee satisfaction were low before I got here," Triplett said. "My disappointment is that I couldn't make it move up fast enough, or faster."
U.S. Reps. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., said he had received complaints for months about Fayetteville's VA. He and Reps. Mike McIntyre and Larry Kissell met Wednesday in Washington with Daniel Hoffman, director of the three-state VA hospital region.
"We shared with him that there weren't going to be any excuses," Etheridge said. "We want to fix the problems."
McIntyre said he heard from dozens of veterans. Kissell recently asked the inspector general to investigate the Fayetteville VA.
"We need the new leadership, most definitely," Kissell said. "We are going to get this hospital back how it should be."
Triplett is the fourth VA director since 1996 to leave Fayetteville amid adversity. He replaced Janet Stout, who retired after she and senior administrators were found to have created an appearance of preferential treatment in a number of personnel moves in 2003 and 2004.
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