walter reed primer

Ever since different newspapers and other media outlets started reporting about The Horrible Conditions at Walter Reed Hospital (tm), I've seen a lot of questions about the hospital coming up online, such as: How can they not have been aware of the conditions? Why is the medical board process so complicated? Why doesn't anyone care about these soldiers?

I've written a little bit about this in a past entry, titled Walter Wonderful *, but I want to go a little more in-depth and maybe answer some questions that have been floating around.

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The biggest problem I've found with reporting this story has been how it has been reported. Most Americans don't know anything about Walter Reed, and I think it's misleading when reporters tell us "conditions at Walter Reed" in the way you might say "Bellevue Hospital" or "Saint Mary's High School". It's making people believe that Walter Reed is a single building, rather than a whole base.

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In fact, Walter Reed is made up of two campuses, the main post in Washington, DC and the Forest Glenn Annex in Maryland. On top of the main facilities being split up into two campuses, the Walter Reed Health Care System as a whole is comprised of a total of 10 military hospitals located in three states, which includes the clinics at Fort Meade, Fort Belvoir, Fort Myer, Fort AP Hill, Aberdeen Proving Ground, and Fort Detrick. Walter Reed also shares outpatient and inpatient treatment with the Naval hospital at Bethesda, Maryland.

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But let's get back to the main campus, the part that is in Washington, DC. I've whipped up a little map for you using Google's satellite imagery so you can see the main post in its natural habitat on Georgia Avenue in Northwest DC. Click on it to see it bigger. The pink line shows the borders of the post.


I know there's really no size comparison to other locations in Washington, DC on this map, but if you go into Google and type in Walter Reed's address, 6900 Georgia Avenue, you can zoom out and compare the size of the hospital grounds with other landmarks in DC. It's approximately as big as the Pentagon and its parking lots, far as I can tell.

Building 2 is the most important of all buildings and that's actually the main hospital facility. When you see people standing in front of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center lettering over the entrance, they stand at the second floor entrance just past the flag pole, where the hospital's command offices are. Specifically, they stand on the other side of these doors.

All of the main activities and goings-on at Walter Reed happen in this building. This is where all the wards, the emergency room, the Red Cross office, the command suite, and a number of clinics are located. The last time I was there, they had redone a large amount of the flooring and wall railings throughout the main building, relocated and improved the pharmacy, and installed a new patient library next to the hospital chapel. A number of wards had also gotten fresh paint and a new Family Assistance Center had been put in next to the Red Cross offices.

Not exactly what I would call squalid conditions.

As you can probably gather from the map above, the main hospital building isn't really set up to house a lot of medical hold soldiers or hospital staff. That's kind of a given - most hospitals may provide wards for long-term care, and in Walter Reed's case, there are even self-care wards. These are mostly used for patients that are still undergoing treatment but will be released from the hospital before too long. It's basically the same than medical hold except on a shorter term.

Medical hold soldiers and some of the hospital staff live in Abrams Hall, which I've pointed out on the map as well. Abrams Hall is home to some 540 soldiers, and that is the barracks I was talking about in my past post about Walter Reed that has recently been completely refurbished - well, in the time I worked there and when I was there last, anyway. Rooms are set up as small "apartments" and have a living area, a sleeping area, and a bathroom. Soldiers are staying two or three to a room, with medical hold soldiers, three to a room is the norm. There are laundry rooms, common areas, and vending machines.

Aside from the barracks, there are hotels on Walter Reed - the Mologne House, which is the larger of the two and has 189 rooms for patients and their families, as well as other guests staying at the hospital; and the Guest House which is a smaller facility.

What I would like everyone to keep in mind is that the problems that these newspapers are reporting are taking place in Building 18, not at the whole hospital. That's not to say the conditions in the one building aren't horrible, but conditions in one building don't mean that the entire hospital is broken or that the entire hospital looks like that.

And what the news media aren't telling you is that Building 18 is not on Walter Reed grounds shown in the map above. In fact, Building 18 is not even a military building. It's a contracted apartment building (a former hotel) outside of Walter Reed's boundaries. Which makes you wonder whose responsibility the upkeep of this building is, too - the Army's, or that of the company the building is contracted from?

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One thing we also need to consider is that soldiers are staying at the hospital longer now than they did in years past. In years past, soldiers were discharged, sent to the VA for follow-up care, and that was that. Now we may have a lengthy process - and the medical board process is a pretty lengthy one - but we have a process that doesn't just throw people out on their butts and wish them a nice life.

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If anyone wonders how the medical evaluation board stuff works, you may want to check out the Army Physical Disability Agency's Homepage, which answers a lot of questions in its FAQ.

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I dug through my blog archives, and found a couple of snippets from my last lengthy visit to Walter Reed, which was in August 2005 when Trueman was hospitalized there, and found some snippets of my personal observations that I'd like to share...

I headed back up to the MICU at some very early point in the morning. The hospital was still entirely deserted when I got back there, except for the workers in the hallways who were replacing floor tiles and rails since that's something that can't be done during the day when the hospital is busy.

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One thing I noticed while walking around the hospital, even at its busiest times, was that it isn't nearly as filled with the mass of Iraq casualties that the media keeps talking about. Now, a large part of that is due to the fact that Walter Reed isn't the only hospital, but you'd still expect a fairly significant portion of wounded to get taken there since it's one of the four largest hospitals in the States. But most people I ran into in the hallways were hospital staff, both military and civilian, retirees and their families, and family members going for their regular check-ups and treatments The actual number of people I met who were patients from OIF / OEF was very small in the overall scheme of things, and morale seems to be running pretty high all things considered.

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I talked to one lady, Aisha (name changed), whose youngest son was there for brain surgery. She was glad to be back at Walter Reed with him because she didn't like the VA Hospital in Richmond.

* In case anyone is wondering, Walter Wonderful is one of Walter Reed's many nicknames. Some others that I've heard are Walter Weird and Wally World.