DENVER – Denver VA Hospital officials reversed course Thursday, admitting their employees broke the rules when they used an improper wait list in the sleep lab in 2012. This comes just one day after the VA made a blanket denial of the existence of secret waiting lists in Denver.

9Wants to Know spent months looking into a whistleblower’s allegations regarding the sleep lab, which performs diagnostic testing for disorders – including potentially deadly sleep apnea.

“I think that putting my neck out for fellow veterans in this instance is the right thing to do,” said whistleblower Tommy Belinski.

Belinski worked for the VA from 2011 to 2014. For part of the time, his boss was the hospital’s chief administrator.

“The health administration cannot make data-driven decisions that are needed to better service veterans without the proper documentation, without the proper data,” Belinski said.

Belinski tells 9Wants to Know he was given a copy of a manual list containing 508 unscheduled sleep clinic patients, and he says he was instructed to transfer the names onto the VA’s official Electronic Wait List (EWL) in May 2012. Keeping a manual wait list would have been a violation of VA policy at that time, according to records 9Wants To Know obtained.

“My bosses were concerned about that,” Belinski said. “They constantly sent out things saying, ‘Hey, make sure you don’t have any paper wait lists,’ and then there were ones that were found,” he said.

via VA admits to ‘unauthorized’ waiting list at Denver hospital.