By now, the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have been widely reported. From the first sentence, the series from Washington Post writers Dan Priest and Anne Hull painted a searing portrait of a broken system: Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses. The Post's story exposing the scandal has rightly claimed the careers of some top Army officials. No soldier should be forced from the battlefield to recover in conditions that wouldn't pass muster in a prison. What's clear from the coverage is that the breakdown represents a failure of facility management as much as Army medicine. While most of the report focuses on the problem soldiers are having while navigating the road to recovery, the story's conclusion rattles off a laundry list of problems in one building - broken elevators and garage doors. Mold and rat infestations. Spotty hot water. The lesson for facility executives? It's buried in a recent article from the Army Times: Make sure your outsourcing contracts and procedures are up to snuff. According to the article, outsourcing slashed the number of facility management employees from 300 to 50. The 5-year, $120-million outsourcing contract was awarded to a former senior Halliburton official, according to the Army Times.
The Post's article says the Army is scheduled to close Walter Reed in 2011. Did that lead to lax oversight of an FM outsourcing contract? Even in a perfect facility, it's hard to imagine that slashing FM staff by more than 80 percent wouldn't cause service levels to drop. In the case of Walter Reed, the outcome was calamitous. When it comes to facility management, keeping mold and rats out of outpatient recovery rooms is not rocket science. Appointing people who will attend to the task, it seems, might be.