Rhon­da Krys­tal Ram­bal­ly

An au­dit on the hu­man re­source and fi­nan­cial de­part­ments of the North Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) re­vealed "gross de­fects." Among them were a pos­si­ble over­pay­ment of $2 mil­lion to an em­ploy­ee and a $40 mil­lion to $80 mil­lion debt to sup­pli­ers. Chair­man of the NCRHA board Dr Ashvin Shar­ma re­vealed this yes­ter­day dur­ing a pub­lic board meet­ing 2010/2011 at The Au­di­to­ri­um, La Joya Com­plex, St Joseph. He said changes were com­ing and many peo­ple might not like them. The theme of the meet­ing was "Im­prov­ing the Qual­i­ty of Life."

The meet­ing has to be held pub­licly at the start of each fi­nan­cial year and is man­dat­ed by the Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty's (RHA) Act to present a re­view of the au­thor­i­ty's per­for­mance, plans, goals and tar­get for the cur­rent year. Shar­ma said the NCRHA was unique among the oth­ers be­cause of the ser­vices of­fered to the na­tion and not on­ly its catch­ment area. The board was in­stalled in No­vem­ber last year. He said af­ter the board's in­au­gu­ra­tion, it di­vid­ed it­self in­to sev­er­al com­mit­tees and start­ed to work in earnest in Jan­u­ary. "At this point, it must be re­mem­bered that we were ini­tial­ly guid­ed by a dif­fer­ent min­is­ter and un­der the reigns of the pre­vi­ous CEO," Shar­ma said.

"What I can say is that at that point in time and with the best in­ten­tions, the board was ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er gross im­prove­ments in an ex­treme­ly re­strict­ed time pe­ri­od with lim­it­ed guid­ance and sup­port." Ac­cord­ing to Shar­ma, such a de­liv­ery was im­pos­si­ble. He said the two de­part­ments–HR and fi­nance were "fail­ing." Shar­ma said the board de­cid­ed to op­er­ate with greater trans­paren­cy and gov­er­nance. "The RHA was es­ti­mat­ed to be ap­prox­i­mate­ly $40 mil­lion to $80 mil­lion in debt to sup­pli­ers and de­liv­er­ies of ba­sic con­sum­ables were be­ing made on a cash on de­liv­ery sys­tem with many sup­pli­ers not hav­ing been paid for months. "We were al­so pre­sent­ed with gen­er­al au­dits from the Min­istry of Health, demon­strat­ing gross dys­func­tions in the HR and fi­nance de­part­ments.

"We im­me­di­ate­ly sought the in­ter­ven­tion of the Min­istry of Health and a sum of $40 mil­lion was al­lo­cat­ed to clear debt to our sup­pli­ers, which when added to pre­vi­ous amounts round­ed off to be in the vicin­i­ty of $72 mil­lion for the year." Shar­ma said the board made a re­quest for the min­istry's au­di­tors to con­duct a full au­dit of the de­part­ments. He said in one in­stance, the find­ings in­di­cat­ed there was an em­ploy­ee who may have been over­paid up to $480,000 a year over four years. He said foren­sic au­di­tors were now be­ing sought. Shar­ma said it pained him to know that de­lays and poor cus­tomer ser­vice and lack of em­pa­thy con­tin­ue to plague the NCRHA.