The Ministry of Health has launched a complaints hotline where persons who did not receive satisfactory service or were told prescribed drugs were not available at health centres or hospital pharmacies can now call, Minister of Health Dr Frank Anthony has announced.
The number is 227-4357 and for now it will be manned from 8 am to 4 pm [Mondays to Fridays]. Anthony told Stabroek News last week that “Later we may do 24 hours.”
This newspaper understands that getting public feedback on the quality of health services provided by the state is an initiative of President Irfaan Ali, who wants data not only on what is being done but what improvements are needed in the health sector. If citizens are able to access medicines prescribed and there are ample supplies throughout the country is another area of evaluation that the hotline services will be able to provide. The Health Ministry has been plagued for years with inventory management problems and successive governments have routinely promised improvements but to no avail.
Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health, Malcom Watkins, had told the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, on June 13 last year, that since he assumed his office, work has been ongoing to update the system to ensure better accounting at the Materials Management Unit (MMU) in Diamond. Watkins had attributed the longstanding issue of storage management at the ministry to indiscipline among some of the employees.
“What we have done… is increase the period and cycle of counting. We… asked all supervisors to count a quota every day and report it… more frequently. Hopefully that will help us to see some improvements…we… also implemented some policies to help us in restructuring to have a better management structure. We have seen already significant improvement but it is still not perfect and we have a long way to go,” Watkins explained to the committee on measures taken to improve the management of materials.
He explained that a sectional inventory was updated and the Management Accounting Computerised (MAC) inventory was almost 90% updated. While two staffers were tasked with updating the system in the past, he noted that additional staff were assigned to speed up the process in updating the inventory. In his 2017 report, the Auditor General said the Ministry continued to be in breach of Section 24 of the Stores Regulations. The ministry failed to keep and maintain a Master Inventory to document all assets. As a result, they were unable to accurately verify whether all assets were brought to account. The report went on to state that a list of 185 expired items was generated from the MAC Software system as at December 2017. While 139 items were valued at $108.5M, 46 items had no value attached to them, due to the absence of pricing information from the Warehouse Management System.
