Parliament probes public hospitals

CHUK

The Public Accounts Committee of Parliament (PAC) wants an investigation conducted on King Faisal Hospital and Kigali University Teaching Hospital (CHUK) after the Attorney General’s report indicated that over 70millions was lost through expired drugs and unused equipment.

The Chairman of the PAC committee, Honorable Juvenal Nkusi, said these losses incurred out of carelessness the institutions need to step up efforts to improve management of government funds.

The AG’s 2011/12 report indicates that King Faisal and CHUK failed to recover money owed to it by patients. At the same time, CHUK is owed over 1.2 billion Rwanda francs while King Faisal is owed 1.3 billion.

In the report, King Faisal hospital also has a long standing debt of a little over 1 billion Rwanda francs owed to Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) and Rwanda Social Security Board, and also purchased medicine and equipment totaling to Rwf2 billion without a specific plan, leading to a loss of about 70 million Rwanda francs of expired drugs.

In the case of CHUK, the report indicated that the hospital sells some medicines to patients at a very high price, which has resulted to poor services and many patients not being able to afford medication.

Appearing before the PAC, the minister of Health, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, expressed her disappointment over the management of hospitals and said that security and judicial organs ought to do their work because it is shameful to see some health institutions exhibit such serious financial management errors.

The PAC committee stated that an investigation shall be done to establish how the tendering process was conducted and why the hospital ordered such bulk medicine and equipment.

However, the hospital officials said that these problems would be resolved, especially the pricing on medicine which was brought about by a new computer program that was installed at the hospital which the staff was not familiar with.

Parliament probes public hospitals