K’bu needs business-minded apolitical head – Sory

A former Director General of the Ghana Health Service has said there is the need for an apolitical person to head Ghana’s premier health post – Korle Bu Teaching Hospital – and come up with a “strategic business plan” to transform the rot-riddled facility.

Dr Elias Sory told Kafui Dey on Morning Starr Friday January 30, 2015 that Ghana could follow in the footsteps of Kenya, which transformed its national health post, Jomo Kenyatta hospital, through strategic business ideas of its apolitical and business-minded head – a former wildlife expert – who was chosen from a litany of applicants who applied for the job after the Government advertised the vacancy in the media.

Dr Sory said just as the Kenyans did for Jomo Kenyatta hospital – which was mired in a situation similar to the current fate of Ghana’s corruption-riddled Korle Bu Teaching Hospital – the West African country could also open up the process of getting a Chief Executive Officer to head the facility, rather than having the President appoint such a person.

“It is allowing the systems to work. Let any person come up with a strategic business plan, let the Board show [it] to the Minister of health, present something to the President that this is what we want to do and we leave out politics. Whoever heads there, all of us vote in this country, but when you get to such a position, it is not political parties that we are talking about,” Dr Sory said.

A forensic audit (2010 – 2014) done into the operations of the pharmacy department of the hospital, has revealed that GHC946,574.29 has been misappropriated through bad procurement processes and collusion by suppliers.

According to the reports, in 2010, GHC245 193 was misappropriated; in 2011, GHC275 287.85; in 2012, GHC146 269.54; in 2013, GHC208 504.43, and in last year, GHC71,319.14.

Ernest Chemists Ghana Ltd, a pharmaceutical company and supplier of drugs to the hospital has been asked to refund GHC21,000, which the report found to have been illegally paid.

The reports made 44 recommendations and asked for a strict adherence to the Public Procurement Law.

A swirl of corruption allegations have hovered around the 2000-bed health post in the past decades, a situation, which invariably leads to the dissolution of each Board and Management.

In the middle of 2014, controversy erupted for the umpteenth time after the senior staff association of the hospital accused the Board and Management of buying nine luxury cars for themselves with internally-generated funds.