Ted Blickwedel retired in 2006 after 27 years in the Marine Corps and decided to make the next step of his career one that involved helping other veterans. In doing so, he received counseling training and went to work at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital before discovering the Vet Centers.

The centers are community-based counseling clinics that were established in the wake of the Vietnam War, connecting social workers and counselors with military or combat experience to with other combat veterans.

Ted came on board in 2009, but by 2016, the people-centric approach to helping combat vets had turned into a numbers game where counselors were tallying metrics and rushing through appointments to meet VA-mandated expectations.

Ted was burning out, watching his fellow counselors leave jobs they loved because they couldn’t provide the help they knew veterans needed.

In 2018, Blickwedel emailed 1,300 Vet Center counselors across the country to learn how the new expectations and bureaucratic demands were impacting them.

It turns out he wasn’t alone in his struggles. The retired Marine lieutenant colonel eventually filed official complaints as a whistleblower, triggering a Government Accountability Office report that, in 2020, revealed the new productivity standards were leading to burnout among many counselors across the Vet Centers’ 300 locations.

The resulting Vet Center Improvement Act was introduced in Congress in 2021, and remains alive but has yet to be approved by...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm1pbGl0YXJ5d...