“The vast majority of Department of Veterans Affairs prescriptions are fulfilled by mail. But as U.S. Postal Service delays mount, more and more veterans are reporting long wait times to receive critical medication and VA staff says the problem is only growing” reports Abbie Bennet at ConnectingVets.
“In fiscal year 2016, VA’s mail-order pharmacy processed nearly 120 million outpatient prescriptions and VA provides about 80% of all its outpatient prescriptions to veterans by mail using seven ‘highly automated pharmacies,’ according to the department. The other 20% are filled at local VA medical facilities. VA’s mail-order pharmacy system, the Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy (CMOP), processes nearly half a million prescriptions daily and each working day, more than 330,000 veterans receive a package of prescriptions in the mail. Veterans who live further from VA medical facilities, especially in rural and remote areas of the country, often depend on mail-order prescriptions. More than two dozen veterans and more than half a dozen VA employees who work in department pharmacies nationwide reported delays for mail-order prescriptions to Connecting Vets. Those veterans and staff spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation from the department or stigma for the medications they use. They provided documents showing medication shipping delays.”