At least 23 veterans, troops or family members who called the Veterans Crisis Line in fiscal 2014 were transferred to a voicemail system and their calls never returned, according to a Veterans Affairs Department Inspector General report.
The VA watchdog's investigation into the hotline's performance launched last year also found that the centers responsible for the voicemail errors, who were contractors hired to provide backup services when the VA-run Crisis Line is operating at peak, may not have trained their counselors adequately to answer calls from those experiencing a mental health crisis.
As bad as this is, and it is bad, it appears to be more a matter of the system working so well that people are actually using it. And that means it is saturated.
Remember, it simply didn't exist prior to 2007, and usage from 2013 to 2014 surged by over 100%. Few systems are prepared to scale at that rate.
XBradTC 
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