McDonald, along with United States Senators Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito and Congressman Evan Jenkins, visited with Marshall University Medical School and Pharmacy students. McDonald says his goal was to increase access to health care for veterans and his way of doing that was to make a recruiting pitch. He wants the students to know about the opportunities available at VA hospitals around the country. He said VA hospitals and the doctors and researchers who work at them have done more than people realize.
“We invented the shingles vaccine in the past year, we’ve invented the nicotine patch, we did the first liver transplant, we did the first implantable cardiac pacemaker,” McDonald said. “It was a VA nurse that came up with the idea of a barcode that connects patients with medicine, we did the first electronic medical record and we know more about post-traumatic stress than anyone else.”
He said it’s the type of research that most for-profit medical institutions can’t do and that’s just one of the unique opportunities offered to those that work for the VA.