In a Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) asked former responder of Veterans Crisis Line Marcia Blane about problems at the Veterans' Crisis Line.
00:04Mr. Combs, one of the frequent criticisms I hear about the crisis line is that management often sweeps problems under the rug.
00:17And I wonder, is that your experience, what you saw when you were the former auditor?
00:26Thank you for your question, Senator.
00:29Yes.
00:30Can you expand on that?
00:32Why is that not a technical term, but often a description that I hear from people who are criticizing the veterans crisis line and the management?
00:41Yeah.
00:42As far as a loop.
00:43What is that?
00:45Sweeping big problems under the rug.
00:48Well, Senator Lee, a common definition for us to work off of, sweeping problems under the rug would be to not address the problem,
00:56not learn from it, not resolve it, and not improve from it.
00:59But rather ignore the problem, believe it, somehow make it such that it did not occur, and no one's going to find out about it.
01:06And you agree that it's sort of something that you saw widespread?
01:10Yes, sir.
01:11Yes, sir.
01:12During my time at the VCL, I brought up many challenges, what we would call in the audit world, lack of conformance to regulations, to VA policy, to even statutes.
01:28And I was told, well, there's more context to that, or there was, or, you know, it doesn't apply to us, or we're VCL.
01:38And no, we work for the government.
01:40We're a part of the government.
01:41We need to comply with the government rules.
01:44What would you say that the veteran crisis line needs to be more effective?
01:48Is it technology, better training?
01:52Senator?
01:53Staffing.
01:54I mean, what is it going to take to make it work better?
01:56Senator, it is about leadership.
01:59VCL, I can't talk for right at this moment as far as staffing goes.
02:04I can't talk right at this moment for budgeting.
02:05I can't talk about those things.
02:07What I can tell you is during my time at the VCL, and I know it's ongoing because I hear and I listen to what this group, this committee has talked to a VCL about and a VA about as far as the VCL operations.
02:22If they needed something, they were getting it.
02:25So from my perspective, the technology that we lacked, which we did lack technology, was the decisions of leadership.
02:32How we staffed the call center when we had people to staff, as the GAO was about to inform you, chat and text was staffed by historical standards, historical staffing patterns, not by demand, which meant we were going to have to double up because we weren't looking at what was demand going to be for chat and text for this time period.
02:53Instead, we're going to staff it at this level, and if it gets overwhelming, double up, triple up if you need to.
02:59We don't have a backup, so make sure you answer the call.
03:02It's about leadership, and it's about the leadership culture, and as long as we can make problems go away, you are my friend.
03:09We heard from crisis line employees who told us that they were regularly texting and web chatting with two, three, four veterans at the same time.
03:22How does that happen?
03:23For the technical aspect of that, you must ask Ms. Blaine, I'm not aware of that.
03:30I can tell you that within this short little period of time I had to dig into industry standards, that's not the industry standard that I was coming up with before I was told to seize my activity by the executive director of the VCL.
03:43An industry standard is that definitely when you have someone in crisis, you're not handling any multiple interactions.
03:50You're handling that one.
03:51You stay focused on that one because that life is at risk.
03:54Now, as far as the technical aspects of how you can handle or how you can end up with multiple interactions, Ms. Blaine would have to answer.
04:00Ms. Blaine, is that accurate?
04:02It is accurate that there were possibilities to have to handle two, three, and four chats.
04:10One, understaffing was an issue at one point when we first came on board, they kept chat and text in New York only, and so it wasn't spread around, and you didn't have enough staffing trained.
04:24So they began the training, the problem is it's now the equipment, the software, the platforms that it's on that causes crashing and things of that nature.
04:34They've beefed up the training for the number of individuals that are going to be doing chat and text, but as of yesterday, speaking with some current responders, they are still being assigned a minimum of two texts or chats at a time.
04:48I've been in Congress for eight and a half years, and we've increased the budget for the veteran crisis line repeatedly.
04:57So is it surprising to you that we would be understaffed and lack training and technology, or to Mr. Combs' point, is that really the leadership issue that you're talking about?
05:06I mean, I find that shocking.
05:08I think it's a combination of a couple of things.
05:10I think it's leadership, and I think that the revolving door of new hires coming in, them not being adequately prepared for abuse from callers, not knowing how to move along.
05:25They want to stay, but everybody doesn't have, this will be funny, my Generation X skin that we can take tough stuff, right, and keep going.
05:36And some of the younger generation, they just cannot handle that level of pressure.
05:41You asked the question about how does it happen when things don't get done or they're pushed to the side because they don't want to confront the truth of situations.
05:52You have to confront abuse because it's burning your people out.
05:56It's causing that revolving door.
05:58That's a leadership call.
06:00You have to want to train and retrain and continuously training.
06:04I came from an environment at IRS where every year, even as Congress was on the floor changing tax laws, we were doing training.
06:14There is no up-to-date annual training.
06:17You get things in TMS, which is the training block, but it is not the same of going in the classroom and being focused on what changes.
06:27The veterans crisis line needs to evolve with what things are going on.
06:33We cannot continue to operate from a place from the origin vision of what the veteran crisis line is.
