By instruction from Minister within the Ministry of Public Health, Dr Karen Cummings, Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) executives yesterday abruptly ended a Parliamentary Sectoral Committee’s visit to the institution’s storage bond.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the GPHC Allan Johnson led the call for the Committee on Social Services to end its tour of the bond as the facility was “not prepared” for such a visit.
“You are asked to go downstairs please… the minister said we should go down,” Johnson told Chairman of the Committee Dr Vindhya Persaud, who along with the press was in the bond.
The visit was planned yesterday and the media were invited. However, the tour came to an abrupt end even as the Chairman of the Committee was receiving recommendations from an acting pharmacy manager.
The CEO ordered that the visit be concluded as Dr Cummings was waiting and she had said that the visit must end.
Johnson’s manner did not sit well with Dr Persaud, who later complained to this newspaper that Johnson was disrespectful and the act to bar the committee from touring the bond showed that the hospital probably had something to hide.
She said the Committee had planned to visit the hospital a month and a half ago but that visit had been cancelled the day before by government Members of Parliament, without reason.
“We wrote to tour the entire facility. We received some general recommendations of where to visit, I think four places, but I did not understand that to mean those were the only places we could see,” Persaud said. “So we toured and I wanted to check the bond because of the complaints of shortages received,” she asserted.
“We don’t need to have a prepared bond. We need to see it in its ‘as is’ functional state so that proper recommendations and that sort of thing could be made.
They were all just insisting that we don’t go there so it made me determined to see why because it seemed then that they probably had something to hide. But then we got there and the CEO’s tone was so abrasive. He said ‘The minister says you can’t go there. Come out, come out.’ He and the Chairman [of the GPHC Board] Ms [Kesaundra] Alves were both very abrasive that I had to say well it is not the minister that is head of this Committee it is me but we still had to leave,” she added.
Persaud said three other tours to the New Amsterdam, Diamond and Linden hospitals were also made and the Committee was allowed free access to all locations.
When Persaud had announced that they would be visiting the bond, objections were raised by Alves and Cummings, who is also a member of the committee. It was pointed out that the bond was too small and could not accommodate the full entourage. The minister had stated that she had to be at another appointment and stayed away from visiting the bond.
Alves publicly stated that the visit to the bond was not scheduled and the area was not prepared for a visit. Persaud however informed her that when the committee wrote to the hospital for the visit, it did not request to visit departments but the entire hospital.
Alves at the beginning of the tour, informed the members of the team that they would be visiting the Accident and Emergency, Surgical Outpatient, Cardiac ICU and the Paediatric Unit.
The visit to the bond saw Head of the Pharmacy Yvonne Bullen explaining the process of procuring pharmaceuticals and lamenting that while she caters for a three-month supply always in stock, she wanted to see that time doubled.
Persaud said that she would make the pharmacist’s recommendation known as she believed it was sound. “I think her asking for that time to be increased should be noted but also the crucial point that most times it is the procurement process that stalls the supply and sees the shortages. She caters to always have a three-month supply but says that it is the process following that is really problematic,” Persaud said.
The pharmacist had also highlighted that the storage facility located in the hospital compound was not on par with international standards and they would have to be “very cautious” of the drugs stored at the facility.
She pointed out too that it is a strain on staff to fetch large supplies of drugs up the stairs since they are not equipped with a forklift.
Currently, the hospital is using the lower flat of the Sussex Street, Charlestown bond and another somewhere in the Ruimveldt area. Stabroek News had visited that the Sussex Street location and the medications were stored in an ad hoc manner, with boxes not labelled.
The Ministry of Public Health had distanced itself from the storage mechanism and inventory system used saying that because the GPHC was a semi-autonomous body it had its own systems.
However, if requested, the Ministry of Public Health said, it would assist.
Yesterday, it was also pointed out that plans are in the pipeline for the hospital to utilize a bond in Kingston.
Since it entered office in 2015, the APNU+AFC government has been at the centre of a number of controversies related to pharmaceutical bonds, their condition and the procurement of drugs.
