In his first appearance before Congress since becoming secretary, Peake also sought to assure lawmakers that President George W. Bush’s proposed Fiscal Year 2009 VA budget of $93.7 billion would be sufficient to meet the growing demands of veterans of a protracted Iraq war.

The proposal is a 3.7 percent increase from the previous year, but several lawmakers have criticized it as inadequate after factoring in inflation.

Peake wants to reduce wait times from roughly 180 days to 145 days by the start of next year. He cited aggressive efforts to hire staff, noting that VA will have 3,100 new staff by 2009.

VA also is working to get greater online access to Pentagon medical information that he says will allow staff to process claims faster and move toward a system of electronic filing of claims. “We’ve got to make sure there is no chasm” between the two systems, he said before his appearance on Capitol Hill.

A former Army surgeon general, Peake said the VA is changing in a number of ways. “It is not just prosthetics,” Peake told the more than 3,000 attendees at the conference.

He also cited the steps the department has taken to improve its vocational rehabilitation programs.

The clientele is changing as well. They are younger. “We have had 1.5 million deployed” in operations in Afghanistan and Iraq., and 800,000 of them have been discharged, he said.

Even though VA had plotted out what the department expected to do in meeting the needs of veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, Peake said, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

At the conference, he said 300,000 veterans of these operations are or have been screened for PTSD or TBI, but 500,000 of them have not.

Peake estimated that half of the estimated 800,000 discharges during these operations are guardsmen and reservists. “VA has sent 700,000 letters home to tell them about access to our system.”

In addition, “Twelve percent are women. We are adapting our system to give them the quality of care you expect.”

At the same time the nature of injuries and illnesses have differences from earlier wars.

Peake told the conference attendees about the polytrauma facilities the VA operates and also its experiences with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and Traumatic Brain Injury.

To Congress, Peake promised to “virtually eliminate” the current list of 69,000 veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment to get VA medical care.

Such long waits run counter to department policy, and a group of Iraq war veterans have filed a lawsuit alleging undue delays. Peake said VA plans to open 64 community-based outpatient clinics this year and 51 next year to improve access to health care in rural areas. There are 289 veterans’ centers nationwide.

At the conference, he added, VA “is all over the country. … We really are there for you. … “I want to see us do more outreach and get them earlier. We need to take care of that whole continuum,” including families and widows,” he said in his address to the Military Health System conference.

“We will take all measures necessary to provide them with timely benefits and services, to give them complete information about the benefits they have earned through their courageous service, and to implement streamlined processes free of bureaucratic red tape,” Peake said in testimony prepared for a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing Feb. 6.

Peake took over the agency amid criticism that VA was not doing enough to meet the growing needs of war veterans, particularly the thousands returning home injured from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In recent months, Bush has released, at the request of Congress, $3.7 billion in emergency money for additional services for injured veterans.