....Director Of Pharmacy Caught In The Middle

The Korle - Bu teaching hospital, Ghana's premier hospital is slowly bleeding to financial death due to massive financial fraud and bad administration at its Pharmacy department and manufacturing unit.

This massive fraud has been exposed in an internal audit report which was sent in a memo to the director of Pharmacy Mrs. Elizabeth Bruce and signed by the chief internal auditor Mr. Stephen Ayeh Perdison dated 26th July 2014. The memo has also been copied to the board chairman, Ag. Chief Adminstrator and all directors.

According to the internal audit report, the internally generated funds(IGF) which is used in paying a good number of staff of the hospital is depleting very fast due to under - hand dealings and under - utilization of the pharmacy manufacturing facilities at the hospital.

The report observed, for example, that out of seventy (70) drugs and other consumables that can be produced by the manufacturing unit of the pharmacy department of the hospital, fifty - one ( 51) of them are stocked out, meaning purchased from outside sources, whiles only nineteen (19) of them are actively manufactured, distributed and sold to other health facilities and the general public to raise revenue for the hospital. This constitutes only 27 % of total drugs manufactured. The auditors concluded that there is lack of strategic direction on the part of the director of pharmacy to revamp the manufacturing unit.

Besides, the report also accuses the director of pharmacy of stocking only 40 % of recommended drugs at the 24hrs pharmacy. A situation that has given 60% of the pharmacy's business to private drug stores and pharmacies just outside the hospital - drug stores which are owned by some of these same people in charge of the Korle -Bu teaching hospital. All these have gone a long way to negatively affect the internally generated funds (IGF) of the premier teaching hospital.

Meanwhile, at he same Pharmacy department of the hospital, the internal auditors observed that satellite stores sell medicines to in - patients on credit without the involvement of the accountant. As a result, the accountant, neither keeps nor prepares debtor ledgers and therefore cannot know when the credit sales get settled by such in - patients.

Furthermore, such unscrupulous pharmacy staff later engage in negotiating for lesser bills to be paid by patients for their personal financial benefit at the expense of the IGF.