Ken Ali

A sec­ond doc­tor at Mt Hope Hos­pi­tal has re­port­ed­ly been over­paid, and at least one man­ag­er has al­so been paid more than the spec­i­fied salary. In ad­di­tion, North-Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA), which runs Mt Hope Hos­pi­tal, is pay­ing large sums to pri­vate med­ical in­sti­tu­tions to pro­vide ser­vices. These rev­e­la­tions have been un­cov­ered in a Sun­day Guardian in­ves­ti­ga­tion. The probe dis­cov­ered that over­pay­ment in salary and al­lowances amount­ed to $264,630.03, for the pe­ri­od April 30, 2005, to Ju­ly 30, 2006. NCRHA's gen­er­al man­ag­er (Hu­man Re­sources) Patrick Rousseau re­cent­ly wrote to the doc­tor ask­ing for a "re­fund to the au­thor­i­ty of the full sum with­in sev­en days," or to "make the ap­pro­pri­ate rec­om­men­da­tions in the short­est pos­si­ble time." The doc­tor was threat­ened with le­gal ac­tion in case of fail­ure to re­spond.

The Guardian re­cent­ly re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly that NCRHA had over­paid an­oth­er doc­tor $844,260.14 for the pe­ri­od De­cem­ber 6, 2005, to Ju­ly 31, 2009. The Min­istry of Health con­firmed the re­port lat­er, and said it had called in the po­lice to in­ves­ti­gate the mat­ter fur­ther. The min­istry said in a state­ment that "au­dits con­tin­ue to be con­duct­ed reg­u­lar­ly at all re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties, to en­sure ef­fi­cien­cy of op­er­a­tions and trans­paren­cy of trans­ac­tions." This news­pa­per's in­ves­ti­ga­tions al­so re­vealed that a man­ag­er was al­so over­paid $39,136.64 be­tween 2005 and 2007, "due to an over­sight." Sources at Mt Hope in­di­cat­ed that sev­er­al oth­er NCRHA em­ploy­ees had re­cent­ly been found to be over­paid.

On an­oth­er fi­nan­cial mat­ter, it was learnt that NCRHA paid $32,746.923.27 to three pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions be­tween Jan­u­ary 1, 2008, and Ju­ly 31, 2009. Med­ical As­so­ciates Hos­pi­tal, of St Joseph, re­ceived $6,042,152.91. West­shore Med­ical, of Co­corite, was paid a to­tal of $1,934,177.85. Com­mu­ni­ty Hos­pi­tal, of Co­corite, col­lect­ed $24,770.592.71 on var­i­ous in­voic­es. Sums owed to the three health clin­ics amount to $9,687,300.64. Re­ports sug­gest that NCRHA has paid pri­vate health in­sti­tu­tions a to­tal of $42 mil­lion in re­cent years. Au­thor­i­ty chair­man Howard Dot­tin had pre­vi­ous­ly de­fend­ed the ex­pen­di­ture, say­ing that lack of ac­com­mo­da­tion and un­avail­abil­i­ty of neu­ro­log­i­cal ser­vices at gen­er­al hos­pi­tals had led to the trans­fer of pa­tients to these pri­vate­ly-owned clin­ics.

Dot­tin said moves were be­ing made to ex­pand fa­cil­i­ties "in or­der to get to a lev­el where we do not have to re­ly on the pri­vate hos­pi­tals." Dr Col­in Fur­longe, pres­i­dent of the Med­ical Pro­fes­sion­als of T&T, has damned the spend­ing as "a big waste," adding: "We have not been in­vest­ing in health­care. NCRHA has just named An­tho­ny Tsoi-a-Fatt as its CEO; act­ing CEO Car­olyn Wash­ing­ton-Aigle has re­vert­ed to her sub­stan­tive post of chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer. A group of NCRHA em­ploy­ees re­cent­ly called for a foren­sic au­dit. The work­ers al­leged that mis­man­age­ment and fraud­u­lent ac­tiv­i­ties were preva­lent. They al­so hit out at al­leged favour­ing of cer­tain sup­pli­ers and "ir­reg­u­lar" hir­ing prac­tices.