It Shouldn't Be This Hard to Serve Your Country by David Shulkin

Author:David Shulkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

26

Visiting Our Allies

IN JULY, WE WERE INVITED TO THE FIVE EYES CONFERENCE IN LONDON, which forty-three times previously had brought together the five allied countries that had fought side by side throughout the twentieth century: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, the United States. The purpose of the gathering had always been to discuss ways of managing the aftereffects of combat, with this year’s conference focusing on mental health issues. I had been asked to discuss our work on improving access and quality—issues that also confronted our allies. We had also amassed significant data on stratification of veterans at risk of suicide, and I wanted to see what we could learn from them.

As the highest US authority directly responsible for veterans, the secretary of the VA was an essential attendee. It had been long recognized that meeting the top allied leadership for veterans affairs was an important and appropriate use of the secretary’s time. For this particular meeting, Merle had been invited as an official guest; spouses or significant others from several other countries also attended.

We flew from New York and, as per government regulation, in coach. Amazingly, this trip—otherwise not terribly significant—would become perhaps the defining event in my tenure as secretary. Certainly, it would be used to fabricate a case that I had misused taxpayer funds and should be removed from my position.

With this conference approaching, my staff inquired whether, in response to several official invitations, we might tack on a trip to Denmark at the beginning or end of the trip. While not technically part of the Five Eyes, Danish forces have regularly participated in active combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, where their troops have incurred injuries similar to those suffered by US soldiers.

Denmark has a surprisingly large number of high-tech companies focused on health, and the VA works closely with many of them. In the fall of 2016, the crown prince and princess made a visit to the VA, and we attended a dinner in their honor at the Smithsonian Museum. The next day on their visit to the Washington, DC, VA, the royal couple invited Merle and me to visit Denmark to further explore our collaborative effort to help veterans.

In the spring of 2017, I met the Danish finance minister at an event sponsored in Virginia Beach by Governor McAuliffe, where injured Danish veterans participated in adaptive sports events alongside disabled US veterans. The Danish minister extended another invitation for us to visit, and he offered to assist in setting up a meeting with Denmark’s minister of health. They had recently reorganized their entire health system, centralizing hospital care and developing a “center of excellence” approach for specific conditions, all of which were of great interest to us at the VA.

To me, it made sense from both a time and cost perspective to combine the two trips rather than cross the Atlantic twice. Danish officials said in order to get the most from the visit, we would need two full days in Copenhagen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.