THE NORTH-West Regional Health Authority (NWRHA) is working on a system to ensure that doctors work the hours for which are being paid, NWRHA chairman Dr Edison Haqq said in an interview yesterday.
He said the NWRHA would have to review contracts to see what doctors were entitled to and make sure that whatever system is introduced does not go “against established practices.”
He declined to go into details of what the NWRHA planned to do.
On Wednesday, the NWRHA issued a release announcing that overtime claims made by doctors were validated as legitimate. The audit did not reveal any evidence of discrepancies or double rostering as employees’ overtime claim forms were reconciled with their rosters.
Asked if the NWRHA had also verified that the doctors had provided service to cover their claims, Haqq said this would require a medical audit. However, he said the claims were verified by the respective heads of departments, such as the head of Department of Obstetrics, who has responsibility to verify claims submitted.
Medical Chief of Staff at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital Dr Colin Furlonge wrote to the NWRHA Human Resources General Manager Stacey Sylvester last year about “breaches of contract employment” by some house officers whose contracts stated they should work from 8 am to 4 pm but some from departments including obstetrics and gynaecology “were rostered for duties in other RHA institutions from 3 pm, clearly in breach of contract employment.”The account verification exercise done by NWRHA’s internal auditor resulted in doctors not being paid overtime for the period of April through November last year. Following the report from the auditor that claims were legitimate, processing of payments began last month. Haqq said most of the doctors have been paid.
Health Minister Dr Fuad Khan was asked about the NWRHA’s plan to monitor doctors’ service and said this would have been part of the performance review and monitoring system introduced by the ministry. He said there was a performance grid that set parameters which the RHAs would be required to report back on to the ministry on a weekly basis.
