A PUBLIC hospital has had to wait for more than five years for consultants to submit some invoices to insurance companies to allow it to be paid, a new audit carried out by the Health Service Executive has found.
The audit report, which was completed last March and released yesterday, said the value of insurance claims at the Midland Regional Hospital in Mullingar that were awaiting submission by consultants to health insurance companies stood at €1.6 million towards the end of 2010.
The HSE internal audit also found that one consultant appointed to a temporary post at the hospital was not registered on the specialist division of the Medical Council’s register. It said this had placed in jeopardy more than €411,000 in invoices due to be submitted to an insurance company.
A separate HSE internal audit found that a staff member at Letterkenny General Hospital had been in receipt of a personal allowance of more than €934 a year that had not been officially payable since 1997.
The report said that the payment of this personal allowance was at odds with a memo from the human resources office stating that it had been subsumed into the salary scale with effect from July 1997.
However, the audit said the allowance had been paid by the hospital for a further 12 years.
The audit also maintained that it was unsatisfactory that a number of nursing personnel on reduced hours had been paid overtime without having worked the standard working week of full-time staff.
The report added that overtime payments to senior clinical engineering technicians were being made on the basis of their basic pay, personal allowances and on-call payments, contrary to HSE terms of employment, which state that with the exception of ambulance staff, overtime should be paid only on basic pay.
Another audit report into Sligo General Hospital found that maintenance staff were availing of five “concession” days a year, in contrast with their official entitlement to two concession days’ leave at Christmas and Good Friday.
“Correspondence from maintenance staff trade union indicates that their members had ‘continued to enjoy’ these concession days and ‘will continue to do so’. This issue remains unresolved.”
The audit reports into Mullingar, Letterkenny and Sligo hospitals were among dozens completed between January and June 2011 which were released to The Irish Times yesterday.
The audit report into Mullingar said there were a number of weaknesses in the internal controls and accounting procedures at the hospital over the timing of consultants’ final billing of in-patients.
“Weaknesses identified included having no procedures manual in place for consultants’ billing, long delays [in excess of five years in some cases] in submission of invoices to insurance companies for payment, allowing a situation to develop where invoices due to be paid had to be written off as bad debts by the hospital due to the delays in filling in insurance forms.”
The report said the internal audit had found that 18 consultants in Mullingar had, between them, 1,589 insurance forms outstanding at November 15th, 2010.
“The total value of claims outstanding was €1,619,252. Of these claims, 697 were for years prior to 2010 and 48 claims were with consultants for completion and signing since 2005.”