- THE HEALTH ministry is ridden with administrative and structural problems which hinder ‘performance and flexibility’ and increases costs, the auditor general said in her 2010 annual report.
The ministry spent almost €43 million in 2010, about €7.3 million more than the previous year.
A major part of this increase was attributed to money spent on “specialised and expensive cases”.
One patient sent abroad cost the state $1.0 million (close to €748,000) while ten cases cost between €200,000 and €850,000 each, Yorkadji said.
Yorkadji said that part of the problem was that there were no direct agreements with hospitals so that the state could properly check on the services provided.
“As a result, situations become faits accomplis in relation to the Republic’s obligation to pay expenses,” Yorkadji said.
Yorkadji cited as an example the patient sent to a USA hospital for a bone marrow transplant at an estimated cost of about $554,000. The hospital however later demanded $3.0 million due to complications. The state eventually paid $1.0 million (€748,000).
“With better patient monitoring and better control of the rates, patients could be sent abroad for treatment unavailable in Cyprus at a much lower cost,” Yorkadji said.
Yorkadji said that the ministry was inefficient in keeping and updating their patients’ archives with “substantial delays” noted for filing payment slip copies into their files.
Yorkadji said that the health ministry did not negotiate directly with Israeli hospitals, using two companies as intermediaries instead which gave “indicative, non-comparable, price estimations”.
The health ministry paid about €93,000 to one of the two Israeli companies for a particular case even though a different company had made an initial offer of about €23,000, Yorkadji said. On a different case the ministry coughed up about €198,000 to one of the Israeli hospitals which went “multiple times over the initial offer”, Yorkadji said.
The two companies got about €7.6 million collectively in 2010 (€3.7 million and €3.6 million each) amounting to 17.5 per cent of the whole budget. The state still owed them collectively over €1.7 million in the same year.
The biggest spenders however were the republic’s diplomatic representations abroad which in 2010 absorbed €32.2 million or 75 per cent of the budget. Outstanding obligations were not factored in despite the auditor general’s request. In one case there were unpaid invoices as of March this year amounting to 1.0 million pound sterling (about €1.7 million) from one of the hospitals collaborating with the London embassy.
Yorkadji also noted that there were double payments from embassies. The health ministry even paid for patients who were not actually approved for posts abroad.
Expenses also go unchecked for years – with those from October 2009 still not checked in March 2011 “resulting in mistakes and oversights not being located on time”, Yorkadji said.
Yorkadji said that expenses get approved by embassy officials who then charge the health ministry using the foreign ministry as a mediator. Although payment slips should be approved, “stamping them seems to be merely a formality” with the 2010 expenses for embassies going over their budget by €3.2 million which was covered by the finance ministry, Yorkadji said.
