James Patterson for The New York Times
September Wallace, a veteran and a member of the National Guard, asking a question Wednesday at a meeting with Veterans Affairs officials in Jackson, Miss.
JACKSON, Miss. — Senior officials with the Department of Veterans Affairs said on Wednesday that they have begun taking steps to fix problems at an embattled veterans medical center here, including hiring new senior leadership, adding primary care doctors and reviewing X-rays and CT scans that might have been misread several years ago.
"There's been some negative publicity," Joe D. Battle, the medical center director, said during a public meeting called after recent reports of problems at the hospital. "We're working to change that."
But his and other officials' assurances did not go over well with some of the veterans in the packed auditorium near the Capitol here, drawing skeptical questions and a few catcalls.
"You have built yourself up so good," Charles Robinson, a Marine Corps veteran, scolded the officials during the meeting. "The things you are saying is actually not true. Your clinics, and especially your blue clinic, it's the pits. It's the garbage."
The blue clinic is one of the primary care clinics that treat veterans seeking basic care. Mr. Robinson said patients routinely wait five hours to see doctors, or more likely nurses, at the clinic, even when they have scheduled appointments.
The session was organized after the Office of Special Counsel, an executive agency that handles complaints from federal whistle-blowers, sent a report to the White House last month asserting that it had found credible evidence of a pattern of problems at the medical center that might be affecting patient care.
The problems, some of which date back at least six years, included poor sterilization procedures, chronic understaffing of the primary care unit and potentially missed diagnoses by the radiology department.
As is required by law, the Department of Veterans Affairs is investigating the allegations. The department clearly took the bad publicity seriously, sending its most senior official in charge of its sprawling hospital system, Dr. Robert A. Petzel, the under secretary for health, from Washington to address the meeting.
But Dr. Petzel made clear that he believed the Jackson medical center was in generally good shape, calling the recent reports of problems "kerfuffles" that do not reflect the hospital's high quality of care.
"When you look at the individual patients that are cared for, and you look at the cumulative data on Jackson, its quality measures, its safety measures, are above the national average," Dr. Petzel said. "This is a good place, functioning with good staff."
He added that he was confident that the three major issues raised in the special counsel report — unsterilized equipment, lack of primary care doctors and hasty reading of radiological images — "have been addressed and resolved."
Yet the complaints by about half a dozen employees to the Office of Special Counsel in recent years, some of which were echoed by members of the audience on Wednesday, raise questions about how satisfied patients or staff members really are.
Among the most serious issues raised in the special counsel report were concerns that a former radiologist at the hospital "regularly marked patients' radiology images as 'read' when, in fact, he failed to properly review the images and at times failed to review them at all," the special counsel's letter to the White House said. In some cases, fatal diseases were not diagnosed, the letter said.
Though the hospital has made staffing changes in the radiology department that have apparently improved care, one whistle-blower, a retired ophthalmologist who worked at the hospital for more than two decades, asserts that the medical center was obligated to notify every patient whose X-rays or CT scans might have been improperly reviewed to determine whether diagnoses were missed. That could involve contacting and possibly re-examining hundreds of patients.
The allegation first emerged in an employment complaint by female radiologists who said they were being discriminated against. Evidence introduced in that 2010 trial, in which the jury found in favor of the women, suggested that the former radiologist mishandled more than 50 cases.
After that trial, those 50 cases were reviewed by an outside panel of experts who concluded that the mistakes were mostly inconsequential. As a result, the hospital decided it did not need to notify every patient whose images had been read by that radiologist.
Now, after the special counsel's new report, the department has sent those suspect cases to another panel of independent experts. But Dr. Petzel said he expected the panel to find nothing new, meaning no broad notification of patients would be required. "I think that is finished," he said.
During the session, Mr. Battle, the medical center director, said the hospital was recruiting a new medical director and a new nurse executive. Last year, the hospital's most senior nurse, Dorothy White-Taylor, was arrested on a charge of fraudulently obtaining a painkiller. The charge was dropped in one county, but is pending in another.
"We need to think about it as a new day," Mr. Battle told the crowd.
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