GAO finds Army medical evaluations lacking

[unhappycamper]

GAO finds Army medical evaluations lacking
By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Jun 10, 2008 17:10:17 EDT

The Army does not keep good enough records to properly determine which soldiers with medical issues are eligible to deploy, according to a new Government Accountability Office study released Tuesday.

And GAO estimated that 3 percent of soldiers deploying from Forts Benning and Stewart in Georgia and Fort Drum, N.Y., who are required by their medical issues to go before the medical evaluation board did not do so before they deployed.

In other words, soldiers who might have been discharged from the military for medical conditions that make them unable to do their jobs were instead deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. The GAO chose those bases because they had large numbers of deployed soldiers during the year previous to the study.

“In some cases, soldiers were not evaluated because commanders lacked timely access to profiles,” the report stated. “In other cases, commanders did not take timely actions.”

GAO also reported that of the 685 records reviewed, 213 profiles were missing and 20 were incomplete. In addition, profile ratings were incorrect for 7 percent of the soldiers at the three bases, and some profiles may have been upgraded to “mask limitations and cause commanders to deploy soldiers without needed board evaluations,” the report states.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/06/military_medicalissues_deploy_061008w/