Elon Musk fork in the road email to veteran crisis line employees
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But it should be more common. I want to follow up on the question, Ms. Blaine, about productivity. Were the people in the call centers under pressure to do so many calls a day or not have calls be longer than a certain number of minutes? Describe to me the metrics that were being applied. Sure. Thank you for that question. So the metrics that were being applied was the amount of time that you were staying on a call.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that veterans that are getting help from the responders at the crisis line, they call back. For example, even though we're told it's not a clinical role, a lot of us that are licensed, we will literally deescalate, give them suggestions on homeworks, walk them through deep breathing, but those things can be easily frowned upon because it takes a call longer to be completed.

I am not willing to leave anyone behind that needs my assistance. So the idea of production didn't work for me because that human services and human life was more valuable than the numbers. Well, I...

I fully understand that. I'm amazed that there would be such, I mean, the last thing you want to do if you're talking with someone in crisis is to say, I'm sorry, but our time is up. I mean, maybe if you're a cable TV, I mean, you know, a cable services call center, that's different.

I'm surprised that anyone would even think of applying that metric. Well, we would frequently receive direct messages in teams saying, hey, I noticed that you've been on this call for a long time. Do you need any help?

Well, what kind of help are you going to help me with if I'm the one de-escalating someone? You can't come in and take over the call. You don't know what's going on within the call. So you're literally distracting me from completing the call and paying attention to the veteran. When did this metric system come into place? In, I believe it was 2018, I think.

So we had a director and then he hired a new person and that person had come from a background in a call center that was more production guided versus being able to be human guided. Now, I noticed that you left in May. So you went through at least several months of the new administration at the agency. It's no secret that there...

firings, hiring freezes, threats of more firings, reorganization. Did that affect the operation of the call center in terms of people morale and dedication, people wanting to stay or go? Talk to me about whether

the difficulties at the agency level affected the call center? Thank you so much for that question and bringing the humanism back into it. It absolutely affected the morale. One of the things that happens when you're a crisis responder is you can develop vicarious trauma by listening to the repeated situations that individuals are going through.

However, when you're concerned, if you're going to be able to pay your bills, if you're going to be able to keep your health care, if you're going to be able to function, that is going to impact your ability to stay focused. Now, I have to admit...

My peers at the Veterans Crisis Line, as Mr. Cohn said, are rock stars. They stayed focused. We all came together in teams, and I would say, hey, here's my phone number. If anybody needs me, text me.

We had to create situations outside of teams to offer support to each other because it was so overwhelming. Every week having to write. The chaos. The chaos was overwhelming and it was distracting. Every week you're having to write a what did I do next week?

or last week letters to send off to an invisible email that... That was the famous five things you accomplished last week. Yeah, the fourth in a row. I sent one of those in myself to Mr. Musk. I never heard back. Yeah, because you weren't. The mailbox at one point got completely full and nobody was answering it. Let me ask another question, and this is not about this subject, but what are the issues that...

There must be a pattern to issues. Are they financial? Are they, you mentioned healthcare. Is there any, can you give us a summary of what the most likely calls are about? So most of the calls that we receive are usually individuals that have faced levels of trauma from military sexual trauma, remembrance of their time in combat, individuals that may have not gone to combat but may have been on a ship,

and felt like they were in a sleeping coffin. Marital issues, we became notorious for being marriage counselors, sometimes having to break up arguments over the phone between spouses. And so it just varied between that, individuals that were homeless, or individuals that specifically just felt unseen, unheard, and easily forgotten. And did you have the capacity to refer them

to VA PTSD programs, for example? I mean, in other words, did your duties go beyond listening?

So, the referral process, the first referral process is to the suicide prevention coordinators and those individuals are usually housed at the VA medical centers, a social work department that takes those referrals and then tries to disseminate them to the appropriate areas. Directly referrals, we will send individuals that are facing homelessness, we go send them over to the

to the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans. When it comes to things like needing appointments, I was a little different from what the SOP said. If I have a veteran on the phone and they needed to get through to make an appointment, I'm going to make the call to get them through to make that appointment. The SOP says, "Transform blindly, let them pick up on that end." To me, I believe that we needed to be more of a one-stop shop.

so that we would not... Can you imagine...

And 90 year old veteran calling in and the call just keeps circling because he doesn't know what button to push. I'm not going to send them over blindly. And those are some of the things, some of the stressors for our elderly veterans, because everyone was wanting to force them to use a computer, go and navigate a phone system. They can't. It's not a part of their generation. And why would we want to do that?

- One of the most frustrating things in the world is to be on some kind of call like this, tell your story and then have somebody say, well, I'll move you over to this other department and then you're on hold listening to music again. Well, your testimony has been very important and impressive. I'd like to assign some homework

Could you supply to the committee further thoughts about how this system can be improved? Because that's the business we're in here. And both of you have firsthand experience. To the extent you can make suggestions about the standard operating procedure or the productivity metrics, those kinds of things, that would be very helpful to us.

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