On October 29, 2026, the VA Inspector General recently released a report covering the topic of delays in scheduling appointments at the VA in Chicago, Illinois. The Chicago VA Healthcare System is noted to provide care for 63,000 patients. The VA Chicago Healthcare System has six locations in Illinois and Indiana. There’s a medical center and three outpatient clinics.
One of the areas that this report examined was patient safety and whether there were processes in place to communicate test results, respond to oversight, and identify areas of improvement. National Trial Law has previously written about gaps in communicating test results at the VAs.
A major problem reported at community care was the multiple vacancies, which had to be covered through worker overtime. This comes at a time when facility documents show that the care consults increased from 25,667 in 2023 to 29,527 in FY 2025. All of this has culminated in the finding in the report that, by 2026, the delay in scheduling appointments after one had been requested took 25 days on average.
These types of reports are a major reason why, when we have a medical malpractice claim involving the VA, we ask in discovery for the patient’s doctors' orders and consult requests, as well as a history of the patient’s consultations. This establishes a timeline in which care was requested and when care was provided. Where delays in care—or, as in some of our cases, the failure to even get a consult causes injury to the Veteran, there may be a viable medical malpractice case.
Our page on VA medical malpractice explains the types of medical malpractice cases that we see and the steps needed to bring a successful claim against the VA. Delays in getting consults can be crucial to making a difference in the veteran’s life. For example, we’ve handled multiple cases where the VA prescribed veterans NSAIDs. Those are drugs that can have “nephrotoxic” effects. That simply means that they can hurt your kidneys. But when a consultation with a nephrologist is not timely placed, that can have permanent consequences to the veteran.