Computer software that was designed to improve the management of drugs and other items within the Ministry of Health failed to function as it should due to the indiscipline of employees, but the Ministry has since taken measures to prevent recurrences, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard yesterday.
Poor data management and data input in a timely fashion created incorrect information on what was available and what was not and in some cases resulted in medication being left to expire. The revelation was made by officials from the Ministry of Health to the PAC yesterday when the 2017 and 2018 reports were scrutinized. However, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health, Malcom Watkins, told the PAC that since he assumed the role of Permanent Secretary at the ministry, work has been ongoing to update the system to ensure better accounting at the Materials Management Unit (MMU) in Diamond.
The Health Ministry has been plagued for decades with inventory management problems and governments have routinely promised improvements to no avail.
Watkins attributed the longstanding issue of storage management at the ministry to indiscipline among some of the employees.
“What we have done now is increase the period and cycle of counting. We have asked all supervisors to count a quota every day and report it out more frequently. Hopefully that will help us to see some improvements…we have also implemented some policies to help us in restructuring to have 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 is almost 90% updated.
While two staffers were tasked with updating the system in the past, he noted that additional staff have been assigned to speed up the process in updating their inventory. In the 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 say 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, forty-six items had no value attached to them, due to the absence of pricing information from the Warehouse Management System.
Responding to a question from government member, Dr. Vishwa Mahadeo, who questioned whether the MAC software was performing at the time, Head of the MMU, Cecil Jacques explained that the software system was not being updated regularly resulting in discrepancies. Jacques related that due to employees’ indiscipline, data was not inputted in time resulting in false readings in the system. He noted that in many instances they would find a variance in what was physically available and what was recorded in the system.
“It was always inaccurate because there was no concordance between what MAC says and the physical balance…many times facilities come, sign and uplift and left the building but the dispatch window on the system is not closed. There are periods when the dispatch officers did close the window so again the inventory is not congruent with the physical stuff,” he told the PAC.
Questioned on how the Ministry was able to predict and forecast needs at health facilities across the country in the 2017 and 2018 period, Jacques said all the Regional Health Officers met with ministry officials in 2017 and went through their consumption list and took decisions on what items needed to be procured. Mahadeo pointed out that due to this measure and the failure of the MAC system to perform, the ministry had expired drugs on hand. Watkins acknowledged that due to inaccurate data there were some shortages and an excess of drugs in the system. Nonetheless, he pointed out that they are at this point making stringent efforts to update the system as often as possible to prevent shortages and overstocking.
